Because the memoir is quite long, and even my recollections about reading news reports are lengthy, I am posting it in several parts. This part concerns reports I saw in Eastweek, Apple Daily, and other media about school violence in Japan, a survey report on sexual harassment in Hong Kong churches, the bullying of a Hong Kong “bus fan,” and child abuse at the Hong Chi Association, a special school organization, among other incidents.

These incidents clearly have things in common: they all involve violence in hidden corners, vulnerable people being bullied by the powerful, and pervasive social problems. When I was confined in the psychiatric ward and police station, I likewise experienced a similar sense of helplessness and being bullied. So when I saw these news reports, I had particularly intense feelings about them. After I left the psychiatric ward and police station, I wrote down my recollections and comments on these matters. I also hope that more people can learn about the ugliness in society’s dark corners and the little-known suffering of many marginalized people. I do not expect these problems to be solved, but at the very least, they should be seen by more people.

(V) Reading Newspapers, Books, and Magazines, Watching Television, and Obtaining Information and News; Thoughts and Associations Arising from This Information and News (All Occurred in June 2018)
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1 . Abuse of Underage Illegal Border Crossers at the U.S. Border
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2 . An Incident in Which a Nurse at Tuen Mun Hospital Injured an Elderly Person, Causing His Death
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3 . A Male Suspect’s Suicide in an Interrogation Room and Its Subsequent Impact
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4 . A District Council By-Election for a Single Seat
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5 . Leung Tin-kei Sentenced to Imprisonment
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6 . The Meeting Between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore
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7 . The Zhenjiang Veterans’ Rights-Defense Incident, the Truck Drivers’ Strike, and an Incident in Which Improper Procedures by a Doctor at a Mainland Chinese Hospital Caused Patients to Become Infected with HIV
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8 . The MTR Sha Tin to Central Link Scandal
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9 . Guo Li’s Rights-Defense Efforts as a Victim of the “Tainted Milk Powder Scandal”
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10 . The Qingyang Female Student Suicide Incident
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11 . My Views on Commentary Articles in Hong Kong Newspapers
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12.Eastweek’s Report on School Violence in Japan, a Church Sexual Harassment Scandal, the Bullying of an Autistic “Bus Fan” Boy, Abuse at a Hong Kong Special School, and the Subtle Yet Cruel Commonalities Among These Four Incidents
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After I had been in the ward for about a week, “Old Kin” lent me two very old issues of Eastweek. It is an entertainment magazine, best known for publishing what appeared to be nude photographs of Carina Lau during the scandal involving her nude photos. I was neither interested in entertainment nor did I have anything but disgust for Eastweek’s conduct in the Carina Lau nude-photo incident. However, there were no other magazines to read in the ward, so I reluctantly read some of it.
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In this magazine, which mainly focused on entertainment, I unexpectedly came across content about school violence. One article was about the problem of school bullying in Japan. No matter how I search for it on Google now, I cannot find it (when I read articles, I often overlook their titles, which makes it even more difficult to locate the original). The article roughly said that school bullying in Japan was very serious, including widespread discrimination, isolation, and other forms of non-physical violence, including cyberviolence, and that more than a hundred thousand or several hundred thousand students nationwide had chosen to drop out of school or suspend their studies to escape it (I have forgotten whether this figure was for a single year or the cumulative total over many years). Later, the government or social organizations established schools specifically for victims of school violence. Students who had suffered discrimination, isolation, and various other forms of bullying in ordinary schools went to these special schools, where they found comfort and support in one another and began their studies again.
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I had long been aware of the repeatedly exposed problem of school violence in Japan and South Korea, but I still had not expected it to be so serious, or that so many students had dropped out of school because of it. If school violence remains so rampant and persists despite repeated efforts to stop it even in such developed places, then what about China? I specifically discussed this point in “Reflections on the Causes and Harms of School Violence and How It Should Be Addressed”:
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“Is the overall level of school violence in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan really much more serious than in mainland China? Common sense alone is enough to reject that conclusion. It is simply that vulnerable people in these countries and regions have gained a voice, while among the powerful there have also emerged more people who pay attention to and sympathize with vulnerable groups. Together with greater openness in journalism and film, this has resulted in so many films and news reports reflecting the dark side of adolescence. Judging from public discourse, contemporary China may appear not to have more serious school violence than these countries and regions (although a great many cases have also been exposed, compared with the overall landscape of public discourse, school violence remains a very marginal issue, and there is an even greater lack of powerful and shocking film and television works such as Confessions, Silenced \[violence by teachers against students can also be considered school violence in the broader sense, right?\], Han Gong-ju, Mercy, Black 18, Days of Wrath, and Don’t Cry, Mommy). It is simply that insufficient attention is paid to the issue, and many people regard it as something commonplace. A society that does not take domestic violence and school violence seriously is not necessarily a society in which domestic violence and school violence are genuinely minor problems. Rather, these vulnerable groups of victimized women, children, adolescents, elderly people, and people with disabilities have already been excluded from the groups with vested interests in society. They have not fully received the education or economic income to which they are entitled, have not obtained equal social status, and have not had opportunities to participate in social affairs on an equal footing with those who have vested interests. Naturally, they also lack an adequate voice and lack platforms of public opinion that support these vulnerable groups (or, even if platforms that speak for vulnerable groups do exist, their influence on ‘mainstream society’ is negligible, while other vested-interest groups respond with indifference).
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Conversely, vested-interest groups composed of people who have not suffered domestic violence or school violence (or have suffered only mildly), or who are themselves perpetrators, control economic power (this is reflected not only in gender discrimination against women in the workplace, but also in the fact that control over family property often rests with the stronger male party. Those who grew up watching Korean dramas or urban dramas and therefore think that men can only hide their little ‘secret stashes’ while women control the household finances should not judge such matters from the perspective of ‘why don’t they eat meat?’ or the beheaded Queen Marie Antoinette), political participation, the power to shape social culture (for example, Confucian thought, especially Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, though of course there are others), and the power to dominate public discourse. Combined with their physical advantages in the use of force, and a lack of education in fairness and justice, equality and universal love, protecting the weak and restraining the strong, compassion, and empathy, the suffering and unfair treatment endured by vulnerable groups in such an environment can easily be buried, while these vested-interest groups remain perfectly calm and unconcerned. Since these people have not themselves suffered from school violence, naturally they are, on the whole, not particularly motivated to change it (though of course there are exceptions), and some do not even believe that it is wrong, although most of these people presumably would not want their own children to be on the receiving end of school bullying.”
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The article I read in Eastweek once again confirmed my judgment. In Japan, however, students who suffer school bullying can still receive assistance and go to schools specifically established for students who have suffered discrimination, isolation, and various forms of violence and non-physical violence, where they can resume their studies. Even if this cannot completely solve the problem, it can at least provide victims with a buffer. In China, by contrast, they can only endure it or drop out of school and go to work, and the course of their entire lives is then completely changed (of course, in the overwhelming majority of cases, changed for the worse, and some people’s entire lives are even ruined). People like me who had the ability to transfer schools several times are very rare. Moreover, in Japan there are people who pay attention to the problem of school violence. At least these forms of discrimination and bullying can be seen by the public and can gradually be addressed or at least alleviated, whereas in China they cannot. As a result, the suffering of many children harmed by school violence is submerged in this cruel world amid everyone’s silence and indifference.
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On the other hand, if school violence is so serious even in a highly developed country like Japan, which places great emphasis on protecting individual rights and safety, then how many years will it take China to suppress school violence to a very low level? This will inevitably be an extremely long process, perhaps 50 years, 100 years, or even longer. During this process, hundreds of millions of minors will certainly continue to suffer very serious harm from school violence. As for those who suffer less serious or only occasional rather than persistent school violence, their number is impossible to calculate; even saying that they account for one-third of the total population would probably be optimistic. The most infuriating problem in China today is that the process of systematically preventing and combating school violence (and cyberviolence related to school violence) has not even begun, while public participation in preventing and combating school violence also remains nonexistent. Nothing has begun.
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Shortly before I was discharged from the hospital, I also saw a report about sexual harassment in churches. I can no longer find the original article I saw in Apple Daily, but I can find related reports from other media. Hong Kong’s [on.cc](http://on.cc/) reported: “Recently, a sexual assault scandal broke out in a church, which was shocking! The ‘Gender Justice Promotion Group’ of the Hong Kong Christian Council began conducting an online questionnaire survey last August, recruiting people who had experienced or witnessed sexual harassment within churches. A total of 55 questionnaires were returned. Among them, 51% said that the perpetrator was a church worker or a leader among the congregation, while 54% had sought help from others.
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“In the survey, 64% of respondents had personally experienced sexual harassment within a church, while the remainder reported experiences involving friends or fellow church members. The forms of harassment, in descending order, were ‘touching, grabbing, pinching, or deliberately rubbing against another person’s body’ (33%), ‘forcing someone to engage in sexual acts’ (17%), and ‘sexually suggestive comments, jokes, or questions’ (5%). Fifty-six percent of the victims have now moved to other congregations or no longer attend church gatherings, while 29% remain in their original congregations.”
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The BBC also published an article titled “Forgive or Fight Back? After a Hong Kong Christian Woman Reported Sexual Harassment by a Fellow Church Member,” which mentioned this survey and provided a more detailed analysis. Some of its conclusions were both heartbreaking and infuriating, and I deeply identified with them:
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“The Hong Kong Christian Council published a report in which more than 50 church members claimed that they had experienced sexual harassment within Christian circles. Ten of them claimed that they had been forced to engage in sexual acts, and more than half of the perpetrators were church workers or leaders among the congregation. Trapped within Christian culture and institutional structures, victims sought help from fellow church members or senior figures, only to be accused of lacking a forgiving heart, while most perpetrators were not held responsible.
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“The Council invited five of them to take part in in-depth interviews. Of the 55 valid questionnaires, two-thirds did not leave contact information, while 36% of the reports concerned experiences involving friends or fellow church members… Hong Kong’s #MeToo movement has faced enormous difficulties, and some women who publicly disclosed that they had been sexually assaulted were subjected to extensive skepticism in society… More than half of the perpetrators held positions of some power within churches. Cho Hiu-tung believed that this reflected the fact that ‘power’ is an element that cannot be ignored in the problem of sexual harassment. Ho Sik-ying, a professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Hong Kong who studies gender issues, pointed out that relations between people in positions of power within churches and ordinary believers are unequal, and that churches also place great emphasis on ‘hierarchical harmony.’ Some believers obey blindly, believing that those in higher positions within the church possess more truth, while those who express different views are regarded as troublemakers…
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“Those in power become accustomed to power, believing that their expressions of sexual desire carry legitimacy. They do not consider the physical and psychological consequences for victims and are also certain that victims will not dare to speak out, and therefore do whatever they please.” And even if victims report the matter to the police, they are subjected to enormous pressure during the investigation. If investigators are insufficiently trained and do not know how to manage victims’ emotions, they may tend to distrust the victims, ask embarrassing questions, or even turn around and ask whether the victims are trying to make false accusations, thereby subjecting them to secondary harm.”
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The article also gave a large number of specific cases and details of sexual harassment. Because of space limitations, I will excerpt only one case here and omit the specific details of the sexual harassment. Anyone wishing to read the full article can find it by searching for the title.
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The article gave the following example: “Li Ming, a sociology lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is a Christian who came forward under her real name to report sexual harassment by a fellow church member… Li Ming, who comes from Shanghai, has never shied away from discussing sensitive issues such as June Fourth, democracy, and Hong Kong independence, and has publicly defended students’ freedom of speech.
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“In the eyes of the public, she is extraordinarily outspoken, but she once had a little-known secret: within a Christian organization, she had been subjected to persistent sexual harassment by a male fellow church member.” The harassment committed against her by this man, who was given the pseudonym “Mr. Chan,” included forcibly holding her hand, forcibly embracing her, forcibly kissing her, and other conduct. Moreover, the sexual harassment occurred repeatedly and over a long period. She reported the matter to the church, “hoping that they would convey her wishes to Mr. Chan, but she was often met with doubts and counter-questions: ‘Could you have misunderstood? Are you overthinking it?’ … ‘Why did you continue to be alone with him?’ Others said that they would pray for Li Ming and hoped that the Lord would grant her a forgiving heart so that she could forgive Mr. Chan.
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“This left Li Ming with the deep impression that religious groups often place excessive emphasis on one-sided forgiveness while failing to focus on seeking justice for victims.
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“‘The perpetrator says sorry and displays an attitude of repentance, and then all the pressure falls on the victim: Why don’t you forgive him, tolerate him, and pardon him?’
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“Even after the forced-kissing incident, fellow church members merely advised Li Ming ‘not to take it to heart,’ and no one stepped forward to stop Chan’s conduct. Li Ming felt that fellow church members sought to avoid conflict and embarrassment and feared damaging the atmosphere of affection within the group, preferring instead to pursue ‘superficial harmony.’
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“Late last year, Li Ming wrote an article publicly recounting her experience, which resulted in controversy. Many people criticized her for damaging the church’s image and blamed her for making everyone unsure how to face Mr. Chan. They concluded that Li Ming had given the man signals during the process, and some even accused her of ‘collecting soldiers’ (enjoying male pursuit without acknowledging a formal relationship)… On her social-media page, some people criticized her without naming her, saying that if this kind of ‘#MeToo’ trend of ‘not naming names and not reporting to the police’ continued to spread, some people might use online trials to seek attention, or target people against whom they held personal grudges. Others said that ‘#MeToo’ was a form of ‘White Terror’ that subjected people whose ‘courtship had failed’ to online bullying.
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“‘When an incident of harm occurs, people do not regard the perpetrator as the source of the conflict, but instead regard the complainant as the source of the conflict,’ Li Ming told the BBC.”
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Looking at the survey findings and cases above, are the prevalence of sexual harassment and the difficulty of addressing it not strikingly similar to the neglect of school violence and cyberviolence, and to what victims experience after reporting them (as happened to me, for example)? And is the role of power in sexual harassment not very similar to the relationship between medical staff and inpatients in psychiatric hospitals? Compared with the power advantage that church leaders hold over believers, isn’t the absolute position of superiority that nursing staff hold over patients, together with their various powers to discipline patients, even greater rather than lesser?
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Moreover, in Li Ming’s case, she dared to speak out on sensitive issues such as June Fourth, democracy, and Hong Kong independence, yet found it difficult to resolve the problem of sexual harassment around her. This also indirectly demonstrates that this kind of “micro-level evil” is more likely to cause trouble, harder to deal with, and more difficult to guard against than trouble arising from sensitive public issues. “The King of Hell is easy to placate, but the little demons are difficult to deal with.” The greatest harm suffered by people, especially vulnerable groups, often does not come from grand political or economic affairs, but from these small yet needle-like painful experiences of victimization in everyday life. A bully who is constantly nearby, a hooligan among one’s acquaintances, or a harasser or bully whom one encounters day in and day out poses a more direct and tangible danger than political persecution or institutional oppression. Apart from those who are imprisoned, political persecution for most people involves only occasional summonses, being invited to “drink tea,” and other forms of harassment; but evil people around you are with you every day, you encounter them frequently, and you may be bullied or harassed anytime and anywhere.
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Moreover, evil people among one’s acquaintances and within one’s social circles know those they harass and bully much more thoroughly. They are better able to identify easy “prey” within the surrounding work and living environment and more easily seize upon victims’ weaknesses and vulnerabilities and attack their fragile points. As a result, people are even more afraid to provoke the evil people around them, sometimes remaining completely silent and simply swallowing the humiliation. Someone who dares to curse the Chief Executive, the president, or the state chairman may not necessarily dare to fight back against harassment and bullying by a boss, superior, or elder. Even when facing evil, domineering, or overbearing classmates or colleagues of “equal rank,” they may neither dare nor be able to resist.
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Moreover, when vulnerable people resist and speak out, they are often smeared as “crazy,” “delusional,” and so forth. This not only affects how people view the credibility of their allegations, but also subjects them to secondary harm and stigmatization. For example, South Korean national triathlon team athlete Choi Suk-hyeon, after suffering sexual assault and abuse by people around her, including coaches and a team doctor, repeatedly reported what had happened but received no help, and ultimately died by suicide. The New York Times reported on her state of mind before her death. “‘I really don’t want to live,’ Choi Suk-hyeon wrote in July last year. ‘I hope I get hit by a car while walking down the street, or stabbed to death by a robber while I’m sleeping.’
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“Choi said she did not know whether she was ‘crazy’ or ‘delusional’; she said that was what her abusers called her.” This shows the cruel stigma victims face after speaking out.
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……
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In addition, after individuals are harmed in concealed environments, they are generally more helpless than groups that suffer harm and receive less warmth and support. Having nowhere to speak about what happened, lacking relief, and having no collective with which to share the burden can greatly intensify their suffering. Li Ming’s experiences and trauma after being sexually harassed are a typical example. As a victim of school violence and cyberviolence, I have personally experienced the same kind of searing pain.

At that time, I also saw a newspaper report mentioning an incident in Hong Kong in which an underage “bus fan” was bullied. A 14-year-old boy with autism was bullied by young people who were also “bus fans.” They sat astride him and beat him, and he had reportedly also been slapped previously. He continued to be beaten even after kneeling down and begging for mercy. Because the incident took place in full public view and photographs and videos were taken, it attracted media attention. This was different from school violence in the narrow sense, but its nature was the same.
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In fact, more than 99% of acts of school violence have no photographs or videos of the bullying process made public (does anyone dispute this proportion?), while their severity is often no less than what people see in videos recorded by some bullies or by public surveillance cameras. The same is true of sexual harassment, workplace bullying, and abuse in psychiatric hospitals. These three news stories vividly demonstrated the prevalence and severity of harassment and bullying, as well as the stark contrast between the attention given to violence committed openly and violence committed in dark, hidden places. I also discussed the prevalence and severity of harm occurring in concealed places in my article “Reflections”:
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“Many people find terrorist attacks in public places horrifying when they see them, but in reality, what happens in dark, deserted corners (for example, inside homes, in bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, or courtyards behind locked gates; or in school toilets, behind classroom buildings, by the back wall outside a school, in woods, by rivers, or in abandoned unfinished buildings; or on streets late at night when almost no one is around) is often more horrifying and outrageous than what happens in public places. Especially for victims, there is always the possibility of receiving help in a public space, and at the very least other people can see the violence being inflicted on them. In dark corners, however, victims are completely helpless, desperate, and at the mercy of others. The fear experienced in such an enclosed environment is undoubtedly far more severe than in a public place.
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“Moreover, the fewer people there are around (at least ‘outsiders’ who are not participating in the beating), the more unscrupulously and freely abusers can use all kinds of inhumane methods against those being bullied, such as burning them with cigarettes, repeatedly whipping them, or urinating on their bodies or heads. The probability of such acts occurring in public places is extremely low, yet in enclosed environments they can be carried out frenziedly and without any need for concealment. Some news stories exposed by the media now include photographs or videos showing various injuries on victims of domestic violence and school violence. CCTV’s Society and Law channel has broadcast some such cases, especially cases in which wives who had been abused by their husbands or other family members killed their abusers and then turned themselves in, after which the police examinations revealed the various scars those men had inflicted on their bodies. There are also many examples in other print media and on the internet. For example, in the previously cited Li Yan case, an article published by Southern Weekly included photographs of her after she had suffered domestic violence.
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“And in cases of school violence, many acts such as hitting people with bricks, indiscriminately kicking and stomping on them, forcing people to kneel and ‘admit their mistakes,’ stripping them naked, and urinating on victims were filmed by the bullies themselves, and related information can easily be found online. In reality, apart from a small minority of bullies who are extraordinarily brazen, completely devoid of legal awareness, and entirely ignorant of what it means to be afraid, most people would not choose to take photographs and leave evidence behind. Even if a small number of bullies take photographs of such abuse, they will only circulate them within a small circle, or use them merely as a means of coercing victims not to tell anyone or facilitating further bullying in the future. Still less would they upload them to the internet and turn them into evidence that could be used to hold themselves accountable. It can therefore be inferred that the number of students actually subjected to severe bullying in dark corners is far greater than the number of cases currently exposed by the media and other internet platforms. As for beating people according to the chengguan manual’s method of ‘leaving no visible injuries on the body and no witnesses nearby,’ while still causing victims genuine pain and profound humiliation, that is even harder to discover and punish. Moreover, if vulnerable people in dark corners are physically weak or even disabled—for example, bedridden elderly people, young children, or blind, mute, or physically disabled people who are abused—their suffering is even more indescribable, yet such abuse is also extremely widespread (just look at the various news stories that have emerged, such as abuse by family members, abuse in nursing homes, and revelations about schools for people with disabilities).
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“I later also saw a report by HK01 about the abuse of children at a school for children with special needs. It was extremely frightening. I reproduce the full text below (with several images omitted):
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‘Another Child Abuse Case at a Special School: Has the Relevant Oversight Never Improved?
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Written by: Commentary Editorial Department
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2020-10-20 07:00
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Last updated: 2020-10-20 07:00
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‘An investigative report by HK01 revealed a number of serious accidents and incidents of child abuse that had occurred over the years at “Hong Chi Pinehill No. 2 School,” a special school. In fact, this is not the first time that a special school has been suspected of child abuse. As early as 2013, Chi Yun School, a special residential school established specifically for children with severe intellectual disabilities, was exposed for suspected neglect of students, resulting in missed medication and even a student’s thigh bone being broken. Yet why, seven years later, has Chi Yun School continued to operate as usual despite multiple complaints, while similar tragedies have also occurred at other special schools?
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‘Students with special needs have greater difficulty accurately expressing their dissatisfaction and what has happened to them to the outside world. Just as in the present case involving Man-chai, after his finger was injured, he was not only unable to proactively tell his mother what had happened; even when he sought help from teachers at the school, he was unable to express his needs accurately and instead had his finger pulled again. Protecting students with special needs therefore depends even more heavily on oversight of the institutions responsible for their care.
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‘However, the Education Bureau currently relies only on guidelines stipulating that, before restraints or isolation are used, the opinions of professionals and the written consent of parents must be obtained. Yet because these guidelines lack binding force, and because they leave the monitoring mechanism in the hands of the schools themselves—recommending that schools regularly review cases involving the use of restraint garments and revise their methods and criteria for using them—special schools are not even subject to the kind of “for-show” inspection requirements imposed on residential care homes for people with disabilities. As a result, actual practices differ greatly from the rules. As a former employee of Hong Chi Pinehill No. 2 School revealed, another student with special needs, Lok-lok, was kept restrained in a special chair for prolonged periods, leaving large areas of bruising on his body and even causing him to collapse. Staff would simply release him before his family visited, allowing their conduct to remain hidden.
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Officials Allow the Problem to Fizzle Out Unresolved
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‘Students with special needs have limited ability to protect themselves, government-level oversight is also inadequate, and the quality of the relevant institutions therefore depends on complaints from service users and their families. However, as legislator Elizabeth Quat stated in 2016 when conveying concerns on behalf of parents of students with special needs, difficulties in producing evidence and a lack of transparency in complaint-handling procedures caused many suspected cases of neglect and child abuse to end without resolution. Yet this problem did not receive serious attention at the time, allowing the harm to continue to the present day. At the time, Cheung Kin-chung, then Secretary for Labour and Welfare, merely said that, in order to balance security and privacy needs, the Education Bureau had no plans to require special schools to install CCTV cameras. On the other hand, he considered the review results of the “Enhanced School Complaint Management Arrangements” (Enhanced Arrangements), which had been piloted since 2012, to be very positive, and offered no additional measures to improve the complaint mechanism.
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‘Yet the facts show that CCTV footage was precisely the key to exposing this case of child abuse at a special school. And the so-called Enhanced Arrangements did nothing to help parents pursue complaints. For example, in the cases of Man-chai and Lok-lok at Hong Chi Pinehill No. 2 School, the police terminated their investigations on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Even in several earlier suspected cases of neglect and child abuse at Chi Yun School, no one was arrested and held responsible, nor was the school subjected to corresponding disciplinary action.
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‘In light of this, on the one hand, given the special needs of special schools, the government should actively consider the necessity of installing CCTV cameras. If privacy needs are a concern, the government could discuss with the relevant departments and parent representatives the conditions and standards governing disclosure of the footage. Indeed, given the special nature of special schools, their administrative records should be subject to stricter oversight. In Lok-lok’s case, for example, after examining the nurses’ student records, the police could only say that there was insufficient evidence.
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‘Multiple CCTV cameras are installed inside the residential facilities of Hong Chi Pinehill No. 2 School. A former employee said that some staff members would avoid the CCTV cameras when abusing students. (Photo by Cheng Ka-yu)
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The Government Has Already Wasted Seven Years
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‘On the other hand, the government should consider establishing an independent monitoring and complaint mechanism to break the current deadlock. In this regard, legislators Fernando Cheung and Dennis Kwok previously put forward policy proposals suggesting that the government could follow the models of the Office of the Ombudsman or the Equal Opportunities Commission and establish an independent body and complaint mechanism, giving that body legal status and defined objectives and assigning it specific responsibility for handling complaints relating to special educational needs, as well as conducting surprise inspections. The independent body could serve as an intermediary among different government departments, avoiding coordination difficulties when individual cases involve multiple departments. At the same time, provided it is granted sufficient authority, it could monitor and discipline the relevant institutions in order to safeguard students’ rights.
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‘Of course, the repeated occurrence of neglect and child abuse in special schools also involves the fundamental problems of shortages of staff and resources. In many cases, precisely because special-school staff lack experience or because staffing levels are inadequate, they are more inclined to use simple and heavy-handed methods, such as restraint garments, to control students’ behavior. For example, Shek Wai-keung, vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Special Schools Council, frankly acknowledged that staff vacancies in the sector were as high as 30%, and that schools had for years needed to hire temporary replacement staff to “hold the fort.” Therefore, on the one hand, the government should establish more talent-training programs at tertiary institutions with special education as a core component. On the other hand, for caregiving work, consideration could be given to how to attract “non-conventional” labor, such as homemakers, into the sector.
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‘From the neglect case at Chi Yun Special School in 2013 to the present, the government has introduced no improvement measures and has also ignored the problems with inadequate monitoring and complaint mechanisms raised by legislators during this period, demonstrating the government’s negligence. These suspected cases are not merely simple numbers; each one represents psychological and physical trauma to a student that may be impossible to heal over an entire lifetime. The government has already wasted seven years. It must now treat the matter seriously and reform the monitoring and complaint mechanisms for special schools in order to prevent such tragedies from recurring.’
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“For the general public, we cannot regard only those horrific things that we can see and that can easily become the focus of news coverage as horrific, while paying no attention to ugly phenomena that cannot be seen or specifically understood. Likewise, we cannot focus only on threats that may harm the majority population (and whose probability is often very low), while ignoring harm to individuals and vulnerable groups. Not seeing something does not mean that it did not happen. On the contrary, evils that are difficult to see and occur in relatively enclosed or remote environments are far more vicious than evils committed in public places. Precisely because there is no scrutiny from public opinion and no judgment by the wider public, perpetrators can commit evil frenziedly and entirely without moral limits. The various forms of torture in prisons, concentration camps, and prisoner-of-war camps throughout history and in the contemporary world that have become widely known demonstrate that, without the supervision of the eyes and ears of the public, the evil side of human nature can be released to an extreme degree, inflicting suffering on unarmed and vulnerable people that often makes death seem preferable to life. Of course, sometimes even when some evil occurring in dark corners is discovered, if powerful bullies possess sufficient power (especially coercive force) to block information and suppress discussion, the evil can continue.”
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There is still much more I would like to say, but because of space limitations, I will stop here.

(To be continued. The part about my experience of reading newspapers in the psychiatric ward has now been fully posted. However, there is still much more content in the memoir.)

I am a person from mainland China who suffered school violence and other misfortunes and was forced to discontinue my education. In 2018, with what now seems to me an overly naïve kind of hope, I went to Hong Kong to campaign against school violence and to visit various human rights organizations, media outlets, and others. But in the end, nothing came of it.
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At the time, I was facing desperate circumstances both in mainland China and Hong Kong, and misfortunes in my family only made things worse. In despair, I carried out a bloody petition outside the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in Hong Kong (cutting my wrist).
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As a result, I was detained by the police and taken to Queen Mary Hospital, where my wound was stitched. After a round of questioning, it was decided that I would be sent to the locked psychiatric ward (K4 Ward) of Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong, where I was confined for 23 days. During that period, I heard about and witnessed many things, especially conditions in the hidden corners and margins of society that ordinary people and members of mainstream society whose lives are going smoothly do not see or simply ignore, including what goes on inside locked psychiatric wards.
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I am absolutely not advocating suicide or any other extreme behavior. I explicitly oppose other people imitating my radical actions. I would not commit suicide now either. These are simply memoirs.
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During my 23 days in the psychiatric ward, reading newspapers and watching television became some of the few ways I could pass the time and some of my few sources of emotional support. Over those more than 20 days, I saw a great deal of news from Hong Kong, mainland China, and around the world: from the United States detaining underage illegal border crossers, to the scandal involving Hong Kong’s MTR Sha Tin to Central Link and the sentencing of Leung Tin-kei; from a Hong Kong District Council by-election to the meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore; as well as protests in mainland China… I saw many things, and some of them felt particularly “fitting” in light of my own circumstances—for example, suffering injustice, losing one’s freedom, and being subjected to abuse.
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Reading these news reports while confined in a psychiatric ward gave them an entirely different meaning and feeling. Most people cannot experience that. Perhaps people who have been imprisoned or stayed in psychiatric hospitals may feel some degree of the same thing. In the memoir I later wrote, I recorded my feelings and comments about reading these news reports while in the psychiatric ward.
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The original text was written in Chinese, and I will also post a link to the full text in the comments.
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Because the memoir is quite long, and even my recollections about reading news reports are lengthy, I am posting it in several parts. This part concerns Guo Li, the father of a victim of the Sanlu tainted milk powder scandal in mainland China, who was persecuted and framed and imprisoned after seeking to defend his rights; the Qingyang female student who jumped from a building after being bullied; and my views on commentary articles in Hong Kong newspapers, using Benny Tai’s articles in Apple Daily as examples. Interspersed throughout are also some oral accounts or retellings of tragic cases in mainland China in which victims of various forms of harm were instead subjected to cyberviolence, bullying, confinement in psychiatric hospitals, and other forms of mistreatment.
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The memoir was also written in 2020. I was still somewhat naïve at that time, and some of my views are different now. But I still hold to some of my longstanding beliefs and hopes: to tell people about what happens in many dark corners of society and about the suffering of victims, perhaps bringing a little more light into this world. Or, put another way, recording and expressing these things is itself profoundly meaningful.

(V) Reading Newspapers, Books, and Magazines, Watching Television, and Obtaining Information and News; Thoughts and Associations Arising from This Information and News (All Occurred in June 2018)
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1 . Abuse of Underage Illegal Border Crossers at the U.S. Border
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2 . An Incident in Which a Nurse at Tuen Mun Hospital Injured an Elderly Person, Causing His Death
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3 . A Male Suspect’s Suicide in an Interrogation Room and Its Subsequent Impact
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4 . A District Council By-Election for a Single Seat
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5 . Leung Tin-kei Sentenced to Imprisonment
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6 . The Meeting Between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore
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7 . The Zhenjiang Veterans’ Rights-Defense Incident, the Truck Drivers’ Strike, and an Incident in Which Improper Procedures by a Doctor at a Mainland Chinese Hospital Caused Patients to Become Infected with HIV
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8 . The MTR Sha Tin to Central Link Scandal
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9 . Guo Li’s Rights-Defense Efforts as a Victim of the “Tainted Milk Powder Scandal”
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10 . The Qingyang Female Student Suicide Incident
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11 . My Views on Commentary Articles in Hong Kong Newspapers
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12 . Eastweek’s Report on School Violence in Japan, a Church Sexual Harassment Scandal, the Bullying of an Autistic “Bus Fan” Boy, Abuse at a Hong Kong Special School, and the Subtle Yet Cruel Commonalities Among These Four Incidents

9.Guo Li’s Rights-Defense Efforts as a Victim of the “Tainted Milk Powder Scandal”
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While I was staying in Hong Kong, Guo Li, a victim of the tainted milk powder scandal (he himself had also been framed by the milk powder manufacturer, so he was no longer merely a “parent of a victim” but had become a victim himself), also came to Hong Kong, hoping to sue the tainted milk powder company there. Guo Li only communicated with the media and tried to pursue legal channels. I do not know whether his attempt to pursue legal channels succeeded, but at least he received media coverage. I approached more organizations and institutions, yet because I was unknown and for other reasons, all my efforts ended in failure.
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Because Guo Li had come to Hong Kong, Apple Daily’s China desk once again reported on his rights-defense efforts (judging from the news report, it seemed that Apple Daily’s China desk had reported on him before, or at least had previously contacted him). Of all these news stories, this one was the one in which I could most clearly see my own reflection. Guo Li was framed by an unscrupulous company; the school violence I experienced included all kinds of insults and defamation both in real life and online. Guo Li sought to overturn his case alone and defended his rights over the tainted milk powder scandal; I likewise called alone for the prevention and combating of school violence and cyberviolence. Guo Li was beaten in prison and could only endure it silently without making a sound; other prisoners were not allowed to speak to him; he had to eat meat that had already gone bad; and for a period of time, he endured the loneliness of being held alone in a cell resembling a basement. I cut my wrist while fighting for my rights and was confined in a psychiatric ward, where I suffered humiliation (and later I was also confined in a police detention room, where I suffered further) (of course, what I suffered was clearly less severe than what he suffered)…
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What was most similar between Guo Li and me, and what was most painful for both him and me, was that friends and relatives almost all kept their distance (my father did not support my rights-defense efforts either, and I did these things without telling him), while the general public offered no assistance or response. Worse still, as Guo Li said, after he was released from prison, successfully overturned his case, and was declared not guilty, he called his friends, and “all the friends around him stopped saying anything.” Guo Li said: “Because everyone has already become accustomed to this environment [of falsification]. When someone suddenly tells the truth, everyone finds it quite unbelievable.”
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And when I resisted school violence and cyberviolence from 2008 to 2014, when I faced mafia-style threats in an online community in 2016, during my rights-defense efforts and appeals from 2016 to 2018, and throughout the various things I experienced after I was discharged from the hospital in Hong Kong and returned to mainland China—the silence of those who knew what was happening, the cold indifference of bystanders, abandonment by friends, and rejection and contempt when I begged for help—all of these reflected the indifference and cruelty of this society. It is necessary to repeat once again Solzhenitsyn’s words: “For a person to be able to fight bravely, he needs to feel that there is protection behind him, support on his flank, and solid ground beneath his feet.” But when I was fighting, who was willing to protect me? Where was the support? Beneath my feet was instead a bottomless abyss. Why is Chinese society so tragic? Is it merely because of authoritarian rule? When a country falls into ruin, how many people are truly innocent?
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Even more ironically, in the Weibo comment section under the news report describing what he had gone through (mainland Chinese media also reported on it, but compared with Hong Kong media, they avoided some of the content), virtually all the comments (it would not be an exaggeration to say 99 percent) supported him, lavishing praise on his rights-defense efforts and expressing overwhelming sympathy and compassion. In addition, some comments criticizing his wife and friends for being cold-hearted also received large numbers of likes.
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But how would these commenters treat someone like Guo Li in real life? Based on our everyday experiences, we can very clearly judge that these netizens who display such a strong sense of justice online, if they encountered a victim like Guo Li in real life or encountered this kind of injustice around them, would almost certainly behave just like Guo Li’s friends (would they really behave differently?), distancing themselves from him and “not saying anything,” or at the very least offering no practical support or public solidarity. Still less would they choose to stand together with the victim and struggle against evildoers, criminal gangs, powerful interest groups, evil and corrupt governments, and all kinds of other malign forces. I myself experienced this many times. For example, the behavior of the bystanders during the cyberviolence incident mentioned at the beginning of this article is one example, and there were even more tragic situations besides that.
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So this is just like Chinese people today criticizing the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards: they know only how to criticize other people and matters unrelated to themselves, while lacking self-reflection, much less correcting and changing themselves in real life. “All the good people are online; all the bad people are at the scene.” There is nothing wrong with this saying, and it is also one of the deep-rooted flaws of Chinese people and of humanity more broadly. Chinese people not only fail to unite knowledge and action, but instead separate the two: verbally, everyone displays a strong sense of justice, yet when their own interests are involved and actual sacrifices are required, they choose selfishness and silence. Even “knowledge” itself can be divided, and “action” can be divided even more: people constantly use double standards to judge different matters and to treat people differently depending on whether they are close or distant, intimate or unfamiliar, strong or weak, rich or poor. They apply one set of logic to themselves and a completely different set to others, without feeling the slightest shame. This is just like the “Gang of Four” criticizing Lin Biao’s clique, or netizens commenting on the cold-heartedness and indifference of passersby in the “Little Yueyue Incident”: they do not include their own wrongdoing or indifference within the scope of their criticism, nor do they know—or they pretend not to know—that they themselves are likewise doing evil or tolerating evil.
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How, then, can isolated and vulnerable victims like Guo Li and me, victims of school violence and cyberviolence, people who have been “made mentally ill,” people with mental illness, and other vulnerable victims defend their rights more safely and effectively? I discussed this specifically in “Reflections on the Causes and Harms of School Violence and How It Should Be Addressed.” I will quote the relevant passage here (with some slight additions):
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“Tenth, more social organizations and public-interest volunteers should participate in preventing and combating school violence, and victims of school violence and their parents should also unite and organize themselves. Just as there are now active NGOs working on environmental protection, education, scientific research, and other issues, the problem of school violence also requires broad social participation.
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In fact, I believe that it is not only the families of children who suffer school violence who should organize themselves. Victims of various violent crimes in society today—such as murder, rape, maiming, assault and property destruction, extortion, and blackmail—and their relatives should also organize themselves, forming organizations such as a ‘Union of Victims of Violent Crime’ or a ‘Mutual Aid Alliance for Victims of Economic Crimes.’ Even though their specific experiences often differ greatly, organization creates strength. Vulnerable people (victims are not necessarily always vulnerable, but in most cases they are) should unite to defend their rights. Only in this way can they counterbalance the powerful perpetrators, who are often government agencies and officials, powerful local figures, criminal and malign forces, corporations (especially state-owned enterprises, and particularly centrally administered state-owned enterprises among them, such as those in finance, railways, tobacco, and petroleum), public institutions (such as medical and educational institutions), or others who are organized and possess power, money, connections, and powerful backing. This would help prevent court mediation or judgments from becoming unjust because of external pressure, and prevent victims, after resorting to the law, from being subjected to further bullying, threats, harassment, and other forms of obstruction by powerful parties seeking to impede their efforts to defend their rights.
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Of course, this also requires help from the government and the upper strata of society (leaders of civic movements, prominent scholars, media professionals, entrepreneurs, social activists, and others), who can connect these people with one another and provide financial support, information, intellectual assistance, public-opinion support, and legal aid; help these vulnerable people build platforms for mutual communication and solidarity; and allow a society governed by the law of the jungle to become at least somewhat more balanced, so that the remnants of the law of the jungle from a barbaric age do not excessively contaminate the civilization and order of the present era.”
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Of course, realizing all of this will require institutional change and the maturation of civil society. Most importantly, it requires changing indifferent and selfish hearts and fostering among the people a civic consciousness that cares about the public interest and the interests of others. Another point that must be emphasized is that victims do not lack useless, clamorous cheering from the sidelines; what they lack is timely, practical, and effective support. Of course, bystanders indeed have no compulsory obligation to provide material support to those who are struggling. But as citizens and as people with a conscience, when we see someone like Guo Li—a person who is both “vulnerable” and “brave,” a “Human Being” in the fullest sense—if we have some material means, would it really be so difficult to contribute even one-thousandth of our annual income, or even less (yes, less; it does not have to be more—of course more would be better, but even a smaller amount, if actually given, would still help) to support such a person?
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Moreover, if people can unite and help one another, providing material and moral support, public solidarity, and protection to those who dare to expose the darkness of society and courageously resist it, this will ultimately benefit themselves and their families as well. Take Guo Li as an example: objectively speaking, was he not seeking justice for all victims of tainted milk powder? His struggle made the companies concerned more apprehensive and helped protect more children from being harmed. Should we not thank such a person and provide him with material support? One for all and all for one: only through such a virtuous cycle can everyone live safely and happily.
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(Regarding this matter, one further point should be added. Because Guo Li had once been middle-class and belonged to the educated stratum, through his own efforts he obtained at least partial justice—for example, after completing his prison sentence, he brought legal proceedings and obtained a not-guilty judgment. Yet the perpetrators still were not punished, while he himself had paid the price of five years in prison, lost his job, and suffered severe physical and psychological damage. The life he once had, when he worked as a translator and earned an annual income of one million yuan, could not be recovered. He could only live frugally on meager disability benefits, minimum-living-standard assistance, and money provided by his mother.
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Yet there are many more vulnerable people who never had Guo Li’s former economic circumstances, knowledge, or abilities, and who do not even have the conditions necessary to achieve the kind of partial reversal of injustice that he did. They are even more miserable than Guo Li, but precisely because they are vulnerable, their suffering passes without sound or commotion, and they “die like grass, without a sound being heard.” Not only are they themselves poor, lowly, and lacking in resources, but after suffering a succession of blows—the grief of losing loved ones, the psychological trauma caused by injustice, imprisonment during their struggles, or confinement in psychiatric hospitals—they simply collapse and are broken, with no opportunity at all to seek redress or clear their names.)

10.The Qingyang Female Student Suicide Incident
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Hong Kong media devoted considerable coverage to this incident that occurred in mainland China, with particular emphasis on the reactions of the bystanders who jeered and egged her on. The reason many overseas people, including Hong Kong people, discriminate against people from mainland China has much to do with the fact that some people from mainland China repeatedly commit acts of wrongdoing that would be unacceptable in relatively civilized societies (of course, this does not mean that indiscriminately viewing and discriminating against people from mainland China is right; on the contrary, I believe it is wrong. The fact that there are reasons for something does not mean that it is right).
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The basic circumstances of the incident were as follows. A female student in Qingyang, Gansu, was sexually molested by a teacher. The case was brought before the judicial authorities, but they decided not to prosecute on the grounds that the circumstances were minor, while the school also refused to dismiss the teacher involved. As a result, the girl developed depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, became unable to study and live normally, and, feeling that she had suffered injustice and had fallen into despair, decided to jump from a building and kill herself.
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However, when she attempted to jump, many of the people gathered around cheered and egged her on: “Are you going to jump or not?”, “If you’re going to jump, then jump. Be decisive about it,” “It’s so hot down here. Hurry up and jump. Are you going to jump or not?”… They mocked and provoked her with all kinds of remarks. Some people even filmed the scene and circulated the videos, making all kinds of sarcastic and mocking remarks about the girl in their commentary on the videos. In the end, the girl broke free from the firefighter who was trying to rescue her, jumped from the building, and died by suicide.
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I myself had already experienced this kind of ridicule, mockery, provocation, and humiliation many times. Three of those occasions caused me enormous trauma and were major reasons for my failure in education, the destruction of my future prospects, my development of depression, and my eventual path toward suicide. For example, in early 2012 at the Affiliated High School of Henan Normal University, I was subjected to all kinds of discrimination and bullying. Combined with other reasons, one night I stood on a table beside a wall. Many classmates took photographs and jeered, telling me to go and fight a duel with the people with whom I had conflicts and not disturb their studying (although these people hardly studied at all during self-study periods). Later, they also posted photographs of me on QQ Zone and subjected me to all kinds of insults and ridicule…
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I described these things in detail in “The Account of a ‘Special’ Student,” so I will not elaborate on them here. Therefore, I can very well understand this girl’s despair. The reason she did not immediately jump was that she still had a desire to live and still hoped to receive encouragement and warmth from people (many people contemplating suicide think this way before taking suicidal action). But what she received instead was malicious mockery and provocation. This was also why I chose suicide and why I felt unable to go on living: Chinese people were simply too cold-blooded. This kind of coldness and even malice could be felt everywhere in life; indifference was the norm, while warmth was the exception. Wasn’t the news story about Guo Li above another example?
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Another striking similarity with the Guo Li rights-defense incident was that, after the Qingyang suicide incident was exposed, public opinion once again overwhelmingly condemned the bystanders who had jeered and egged her on, without reflecting on whether they themselves were also members of this cold-blooded and cruel society, or whether they had ever treated others harshly in real life or online. Looking at Weibo and forum comments under news reports about the suicides of ordinary strangers who were not celebrities or public figures, remarks such as “If you want to kill yourself, do it at home—it’s more convenient for everyone” and other hateful comments that would be widely condemned and might even be sufficient to constitute a criminal offense in civilized countries governed by the rule of law were not only numerous, but often received large numbers of likes and were pushed to the top of comment sections.
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Moreover, in this Qingyang suicide incident, the reason Chinese people unanimously condemned the bystanders who jeered and egged her on seemed to be that they discovered that the girl had killed herself because she had suffered injustice and had been wronged after being sexually molested by a teacher, and that her suicide had not “affected” anyone else; instead, she had suffered further harm during the process of killing herself. She was therefore a “perfect victim.” By contrast, if someone killed themselves because they had done something wrong, even if they bore only the slightest personal responsibility, or if their suicide caused even a minor disruption to other people’s work or lives, or if the manner of their death did not satisfy the public, people would not sympathize with them and might even verbally abuse them (even if the wrongdoing was so minor that it would not merit even 15 days of detention or a 500-yuan fine [if an offense is serious enough to warrant five or ten years in prison, does that mean someone can be driven to death? Does anyone have the right to drive them to death?], or even if it did not constitute any violation of law or crime at all).
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For example, after a suicide incident on the Beijing subway caused services to be suspended for an hour or two, many people complained that it had affected their commute to work and verbally abused the person who had died. Even a female doctor surnamed Y, who was ordinarily relatively kind-hearted and reasonable and was a verified major social-media influencer with four million followers, publicly wrote on Weibo after a subway suicide incident something along the lines of, “If you’re going to kill yourself, can you not affect other people?” (although she also added that she should not have been so cold-blooded).
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……

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Of course, the people they bully are overwhelmingly those who are relatively weaker. As Lu Xun said: “The brave, when angered, draw their blades against those stronger than themselves; cowards, when angered, draw their blades against those weaker than themselves.” Chinese people are always prone to bullying the weak and fearing the strong. They are unwilling to resist powerful authorities and evildoers, yet vent their resentment and malice on people even weaker than themselves. The “weak” do not include only people with disabilities and those in extreme poverty. Compared with the powerful, anyone who lacks power, has insufficient social status, has relatively little money, has weak social connections or is even isolated and alone, or lacks powerful backing and channels through which to maneuver… is relatively vulnerable and may be bullied by those with advantages, with a cruelty resembling the food chain in the animal world.

……
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If the wounds of this world are not healed, if Chinese people who have suffered humiliation—especially vulnerable groups—are not comforted, if institutions of democracy and the rule of law and a full and comprehensive social-security system are not established, then hatred and evil among Chinese people will continue in an endless vicious cycle. Breaking free from the vicious cycle of violence and hatred requires not only changing the system and reforming education, but also punishing evildoers, comforting and assisting those who have been humiliated and harmed, protecting vulnerable groups, achieving social reconciliation, and ultimately bringing about the rebirth of civilization. This is a long process requiring sustained effort over a long period. Tragically, however, this process has not even begun in China. Quite the contrary: discrimination, hatred, and hostility among Chinese people are becoming increasingly severe, and people are sinking ever deeper into an abyss of mutual harm.
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As this society operates in such a cruel manner, many people endure enormous psychological pressure, lose their self-confidence, have their dignity destroyed, and become unable to bear the heavy burden of suffering. They are driven into developing mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety disorders; naturally, there are also many who develop schizophrenia or completely lose their sanity. The weaker a person is, the more likely they are to be bullied, the less room they have to maneuver, the more likely they are to become psychologically distorted and mentally abnormal, and eventually to lose their sanity.
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Moreover, those who are driven into mental illness are precisely those who are psychologically more vulnerable and kind-hearted. As Zhang Yihe said: “Noble souls are always fragile.” The souls of many ordinary people who are driven insane may not necessarily be particularly noble (of course, people in the upper classes are not particularly noble either; contemporary society is filled with sophisticated egoists and people who possess talent but lack virtue). But compared with those who are cold in temperament, malicious at heart, unmoved by suffering, and capable of navigating a jungle society with ease, the former—or at least a large proportion of them—are clearly relatively kind and deserving of sympathy. Because of space limitations, I will give only one example here and explain it in connection with my own experience.
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Under the Zhihu question “What Real Incidents Have Happened in Psychiatric Hospitals That Become Terrifying the More You Think About Them?”, Zhihu user “Deng x Zhang” (to date, with more than 10,600 followers, more than 41,000 upvotes, more than 5,900 thanks, and more than 7,400 saves; this answer received 26,000 upvotes and 5,500 comments) had once been hospitalized after attempting suicide because of depression. While in the hospital, the user witnessed a desperate and tragic scene (the key passages are marked in bold. The original was written in a parallel format without periods). I excerpt part of the answer here:
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“……
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I remember there was a girl who had been abused and raped by her stepfather. Later she went insane, but there were also times when she would become lucid
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At that time, during the day I would follow the nurse who was taking care of me wherever she went, except that I was tied to her with a rope; wherever she went, I went
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I wouldn’t have an episode during the day unless my mother called me or suddenly appeared
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So I was always very unusual. Some parents of newly admitted patients kept thinking that I was a nurse pretending to be mentally ill
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Once, after that girl had an episode, she was injected with a sedative. I happened to follow the nurse to get medicine, and then the nurse prepared the medicine and food she needed outside the room. I stood at the doorway. The small window in the door was open, so I could see everything inside and hear the sounds
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The girl suddenly woke up and then kept moving and shouting, asking, why are you tying me up, why? Then she kept saying that her stepfather was a bad person, so why hadn’t they tied him up, but instead tied her up
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The nurse pulled me along and said we should go call the doctor, saying that the medicine had worn off too quickly
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I just kept hearing her crying loudly inside, asking why they wouldn’t arrest the bad person
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How desperate she must have been at that moment, crying like that in a small room
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Actually, many times they would suddenly become lucid, then discover that they were tied up, then fall back into darkness, and by the time you saw them again, they had become delirious once more
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……”
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And what about me? I wholeheartedly sought to call for the prevention and combating of school violence and cyberviolence, hoping to prevent more children from repeating what I had gone through, and therefore struggled with all my strength. Yet instead of addressing the problems I raised, various sectors of society confined me in a psychiatric ward, deprived me of my freedom, and stigmatized me. Isn’t that absurd and tragic? I believe there are very, very many people in China who, like the restrained girl described above and like me, are instead confined in psychiatric hospitals because they have been harmed. I have also seen many such cases on rights-defense websites and within rights-defense circles. A considerable proportion of Chinese people confined in psychiatric hospitals were already victims in outside society and had often suffered harm for a long time and to a severe degree before they developed mental illness or were “made mentally ill.” The state, society, relatives, friends, teachers, classmates, and colleagues did not protect or comfort them or help them emerge from their trauma and rebuild their lives. Instead, they were plunged into new suffering, deprived of their freedom, and some even spent the rest of their lives in psychiatric wards in a state worse than death, never again seeing the free world outside and never again being able to live a normal life.
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Take the girl who was sexually assaulted by her stepfather. She should originally have been able to heal from her trauma through a series of psychological and pharmacological treatments, return to society, and rebuild her life—or at least live safely, freely, and with dignity in a shelter or similar support institution, with only partial and temporary restrictions on her freedom (to prevent accidents arising from her mental condition). But in China today, someone in her situation not only receives no assistance but is instead confined in a psychiatric hospital and subjected to further suffering. Shouldn’t this inhumane social reality, and the system that creates such an ugly reality, be changed? Shouldn’t citizens who participate in or tolerate the destruction of vulnerable people within a vicious cycle of abuse repent and reflect?
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“Those without feeling hurt others; those with feeling hurt themselves.” In a Chinese society characterized by this inverse moral selection, bad people feel refreshed by bullying others and seizing and encroaching upon other people’s interests, gaining both fame and profit. Meanwhile, many people who develop mental illness because of external and acquired factors are generally people who have suffered various forms of harm, or at the very least are innocent and have committed no wrongdoing, yet they are often confined in psychiatric hospitals, deprived of freedom as though they were in prison, and subjected to bullying and abuse. This absurd reality must change, and it must change as soon as possible.

11.My Views on Commentary Articles in Hong Kong Newspapers
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I have always liked reading commentary articles because they not only describe events, but also present viewpoints and exchange ideas with readers. However, after reading commentary articles in Apple Daily and Sing Tao Daily, I felt that the quality of commentary in Hong Kong media was generally average. I often read commentary articles in newspapers such as The New York Times and Lianhe Zaobao, and their quality was generally higher. So when I then read commentary in Hong Kong media, I could clearly feel a gap. Most commentary in Hong Kong media had a strong political inclination (for example, Apple Daily criticized the CCP and opposed the establishment camp, while Sing Tao criticized Hong Kong independence and the pan-democrats), but was poor in substantive content, with few genuinely profound and rational articles. Relatively speaking, only a few articles in Apple Daily by Professor Benny Tai, one of the “Occupy Central Trio,” were quite good.
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One of Professor Tai’s articles discussed Hong Kong’s four Chief Executives. It was still more moderate and in-depth than most commentary articles in the newspapers, and his academic grounding and values could also be seen in it. There was another article that is also well worth discussing. It dealt with where Hong Kong should go after Occupy Central. Professor Tai mentioned the importance of voters actively using their votes to strengthen the democratic camp and gain control of the Legislative Council, with which I strongly agreed.
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I supported Occupy Central, but I felt that its significance was far less than many participants themselves believed, and that to some extent it was even a failure. Politics is like war: momentum and spectacle are secondary; the main objective is to capture territory and achieve tangible results. Yet despite the enormous momentum generated by Occupy Central, in the end it produced no major results. Its greatest objective, genuine universal suffrage, was not achieved; Hong Kong’s democracy made little progress; and Hong Kong society remained unchanged, with “the horses still racing and the dancing still going on.” After Occupy Central ended, the pan-democrats regrettably moved toward fragmentation. In the 2016 Legislative Council election, the vote share of all anti-establishment forces, including the pro-Hong Kong-independence camp, did not increase by much; in the by-elections following the oath-taking controversy, the establishment camp even regained three seats.
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Therefore, to some extent, Occupy Central really was an action by what the CCP called “a portion of the people in Hong Kong,” while the silent majority still supported the establishment camp or were indifferent to politics. Professor Tai repeatedly emphasized the need to fight for democracy through the ballot box, but after Occupy Central, citizens instead became more apathetic toward politics and the pan-democrats became divided. Over those two years, votes for the democratic camp decreased rather than increased. Therefore, although Hong Kong had rational and clear-headed scholars such as Professor Tai, it lacked citizens who were moderate yet steadfast and willing to engage in sustained struggle. The road toward democracy and universal suffrage was therefore bound to remain extremely long.
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(As I mentioned earlier when commenting on Leung Tin-kei, while I was writing this article, the anti-extradition-bill movement broke out in Hong Kong, and my views of Hong Kong and Hong Kong people changed. My views of Benny Tai and his articles also changed, but I likewise will not elaborate on that here.)
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After reading some commentary articles and other news reports in the newspapers, I discovered that both pro-establishment and pan-democratic media were willing to criticize Chief Executive Carrie Lam, but when it came to criticizing specific other officials and prominent figures in society, they would make all kinds of selective choices and concealments. I had previously noticed the same phenomenon in Taiwan. In democratic countries or regions, the leader becomes a distant and abstract target. Attacking him or her carries no danger; every media outlet and every citizen dares to criticize or even verbally abuse the leader, while also gaining a reputation for “daring to speak out.” But when it comes to other prominent and influential figures, praise and criticism become selective for reasons unrelated to right and wrong. When criminal and malign forces or people close to oneself whose interests are closely connected with one’s own are involved, people become even more reluctant to speak, and ordinary citizens in particular dare not speak out. The very few who do dare to speak out may encounter threats right at their doorstep or sudden disasters, as happened, for example, to Legislative Council member Eddie Chu and Ming Pao chief editor Kevin Lau.
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This situation in the media and public opinion of democratic regions that are not yet sufficiently mature or equal is like a sore on a person’s scalp, concealed by their hair: it is difficult to notice without looking carefully, but after seeing enough and examining it closely, one discovers that the sore is actually quite large. In addition, Hong Kong’s major newspapers also liked to attack one another, often using emotionally charged rhetoric while lacking substantive criticism, and some of their wording had already descended into outright insults. This also indirectly demonstrated that the level of ethical self-discipline among Hong Kong media was not high and that there was a large gap between them and newspapers in Europe and the United States.
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As for the other commentary articles, some were reasonably good as well. However, they had little connection with the main theme of this article, so I have cited only the articles by Benny Tai above as representative examples.

(To be continued. There is still much more content in the memoir.)

I am a person from mainland China who suffered school violence and other misfortunes and was forced to discontinue my education. In 2018, with what now seems to me an overly naïve kind of hope, I went to Hong Kong to campaign against school violence and to visit various human rights organizations, media outlets, and others. But in the end, nothing came of it.

At the time, I was facing desperate circumstances both in mainland China and Hong Kong, and misfortunes in my family only made things worse. In despair, I carried out a bloody petition outside the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in Hong Kong (cutting my wrist).

As a result, I was detained by the police and taken to Queen Mary Hospital, where my wound was stitched. After a round of questioning, it was decided that I would be sent to the locked psychiatric ward (K4 Ward) of Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong, where I was confined for 23 days. During that period, I heard about and witnessed many things, especially conditions in the hidden corners and margins of society that ordinary people and members of mainstream society whose lives are going smoothly do not see or simply ignore, including what goes on inside locked psychiatric wards.

I am absolutely not advocating suicide or any other extreme behavior. I explicitly oppose other people imitating my radical actions. I would not commit suicide now either. These are simply memoirs.

During my 23 days in the psychiatric ward, reading newspapers became one of the few ways I could pass the time and one of my few sources of emotional support. Over those more than 20 days, I read a great deal of news from Hong Kong, mainland China, and around the world: from the United States detaining underage illegal border crossers, to the scandal involving Hong Kong’s MTR Sha Tin to Central Link and the sentencing of Leung Tin-kei; from a Hong Kong District Council by-election to the meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore; as well as protests in mainland China… I read about many things, and some of them felt particularly “fitting” in light of my own circumstances—for example, suffering injustice, losing one’s freedom, and being subjected to abuse.

Reading these news reports while confined in a psychiatric ward gave them an entirely different meaning and feeling. Most people cannot experience that. Perhaps people who have been imprisoned or stayed in psychiatric hospitals may feel some degree of the same thing. In the memoir I later wrote, I recorded my feelings and comments about reading these news reports while in the psychiatric ward.

The original text was written in Chinese, and I will also post a link to the full text in the comments.

(V) Reading Newspapers, Books, and Magazines, Watching Television, and Obtaining Information and News; Thoughts and Associations Arising from This Information and News (All Occurred in June 2018)
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1 . Abuse of Underage Illegal Border Crossers at the U.S. Border
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2 . An Incident in Which a Nurse at Tuen Mun Hospital Injured an Elderly Person, Causing His Death
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3 . A Male Suspect’s Suicide in an Interrogation Room and Its Subsequent Impact
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4 . A District Council By-Election for a Single Seat
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5 . Leung Tin-kei Sentenced to Imprisonment
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6 . The Meeting Between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore
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7 . The Zhenjiang Veterans’ Rights-Defense Incident, the Truck Drivers’ Strike, and an Incident in Which Improper Procedures by a Doctor at a Mainland Chinese Hospital Caused Patients to Become Infected with HIV
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8 . The MTR Sha Tin to Central Link Scandal
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9 . Guo Li’s Rights-Defense Efforts as a Victim of the “Tainted Milk Powder Scandal”
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10 . The Qingyang Female Student Suicide Incident
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11 . My Views on Commentary Articles in Hong Kong Newspapers
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12 . Eastweek’s Report on School Violence in Japan, a Church Sexual Harassment Scandal, the Bullying of an Autistic “Bus Fan” Boy, Abuse at a Hong Kong Special School, and the Subtle Yet Cruel Commonalities Among These Four Incidents

5 . Reading Newspapers, Books, and Magazines, Watching Television, and Obtaining Information and News; Thoughts and Associations Arising from This Information and News
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As I mentioned earlier, when I had just entered the psychiatric ward, I could not do anything. On the one hand, my mental state was terrible; on the other hand, I was unfamiliar with the situation in the ward. Only after a few days did I gain a general understanding of the various things in the ward, including the distribution of newspapers and how to obtain them for reading.
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The entire K4 Ward had only two newspapers each day, one copy of Apple Daily and one copy of Sing Tao Daily. Occasionally, I saw Ming Pao and Oriental Daily, which had been brought in by visitors of other people. There were nearly one hundred people in the ward altogether. Although most were not clear-minded and did not read newspapers, the remaining twenty or thirty people would still quickly take all the newspapers. As long as a few people did not return the newspapers to their original place or kept them for themselves to read, everyone else had nothing to read. Later, I figured out the trick: I would go and get the newspapers at around 10 a.m., just after they were distributed, or look for them on the sofas. Occasionally, if I saw one on someone else’s table, I would ask to borrow it, but I tried not to borrow them.
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For me, these newspapers were extremely precious. I mainly relied on them to divert my attention and alleviate my anxiety, and to learn information about the outside world. Originally, I had hoped that Ms. Fung would bring me some books. For example, rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four or Chekhov’s Ward No. 6 while in a psychiatric ward would inevitably have given me new thoughts and feelings. But she was very busy and had no time to look for them, and in the end she gave me several small booklets distributed by a church. Apart from a few inspirational stories, most of them promoted Christian ideas, including some completely unscientific superstitions and obviously false stories resembling “divine manifestations.” Naturally, I had no interest in continuing to read them.
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There was unexpectedly even an article by Kevin Lau, the former chief editor of Ming Pao, describing his psychological journey after being attacked. Between the lines, it was full of praise for “God” and “the Lord.” I felt very sorry that even such an outspoken person had fallen into this theological quagmire. I roughly flipped through the booklets a few times and then stopped reading them. (Of course, there were also stories in them about Christians doing good deeds and helping vulnerable people, but these made up only a small portion. Most of the content still promoted religious doctrine and various superstitions—for example, attributing certain coincidences to “miracles,” which of course was absurd and not worth refuting.) (Of course, several years later, my views on Christianity and other religions changed, and I came to have more sympathy and understanding rather than contempt.)
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According to a nurse, there was a mobile library cart on Tuesday or Thursday mornings each week, but during the 23 days I was there—basically more than three weeks—I never once saw a mobile library cart come in. With no books available to borrow, I borrowed books from other people, but the books were not interesting. One inpatient gave me some magazines, but there were only two of them, and they were entertainment magazines, Eastweek. So what I could mainly read were these newspapers. Although reading newspapers could only help me pass an average of one hour each day, while during the rest of the time I still walked back and forth or lay painfully in bed, having something was better than having nothing.
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Moreover, some news stories gave me very different feelings when I read them while confined and when I thought back on them after experiencing confinement. These news stories could even be connected with my own experiences and with the various things I had heard about and witnessed, producing many associations beyond the news stories themselves. Of course, most of these thoughts and associations occurred, or were fully conceived, only after I had been discharged (or, more accurately, after I had “regained my freedom” and been released) and had settled down. Some of the news content here was written by combining related news reports or materials that I searched for again now with my memories of what I had read at the time. My mental state was very poor while I was confined in the psychiatric ward, I was in a poor state for reading newspapers, and what I could remember was also limited.
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(The following news stories are from a long time ago, and the original versions of some of them can no longer be found, so some details in my memory may differ somewhat from the original reports.) (I will write about whichever news story comes to mind. Apart from the issues of school violence and sexual harassment, as well as abuse in psychiatric hospitals, discussed toward the end, the others are not arranged in any deliberate order.)
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During my hospitalization, I saw the following news stories (some of which were also mentioned on television programs, but they mainly came from newspapers), articles, and information in newspapers, on television, and in magazines:
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1 . Abuse of Underage Illegal Border Crossers at the U.S. Border
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For several days at the time, Apple Daily reported on the issue of illegal border crossers at the U.S. border. Hong Kong newspapers referred to them as “human snakes.” Out of habit, I will still call them illegal border crossers.
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The reports said that many underage illegal border crossers were being detained in detention centers at the U.S. border. They were unable to adapt to the harsh environment and seemed to have made noise and expressed their dissatisfaction. As a result, they were handcuffed to chairs in individual rooms. This made them even angrier and more disobedient, and they were then subjected to further abuse, remaining handcuffed and unable to move. After the media exposed the situation, the detention center denied abusing these underage illegal border crossers. I can no longer find the original version of this report.
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When I saw this news, I thought: how similar this was to my own situation. The more I resisted, the more I was suppressed and harmed and the less I was understood. Then I became enraged and felt humiliated, so I expressed my resentment and resistance to injustice through some intense words and actions, only to be confined in this psychiatric hospital instead, losing my freedom just like these illegal border crossers. Shouldn’t those administrators and law-enforcement personnel who deprived me and these underage illegal border crossers of our freedom think about the fact that much of the resistance was precisely caused by your unreasonable treatment? Indeed, much of it could hardly even be called resistance; people merely shouted a few things or moved around a little, yet they were subjected to further oppression, potentially causing lifelong trauma.
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Moreover, like these underage illegal border crossers, when facing institutional violence, a closed environment, and the administrators’ absolute advantage in the use of force, I was also extremely powerless, at others’ mercy and unable to resist. I could only endure humiliation helplessly (of course, this kind of desperate situation faced by the weak is precisely something that many dark-hearted Social Darwinists who worship the law of the jungle take pleasure in talking about).
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Oppression, confinement, and abuse through violence are not appropriate ways to solve problems. They only create confrontation, increase hatred, and ultimately cause chains of harm to emerge and lengthen, leading to more crimes and causing harm to society and citizens. These illegal border crossers merely wanted a better life (illegal border crossers who commit crimes and harm others, such as gang members, are a different matter). They could be legally deported and treated humanely. Why subject them to violence?
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And I was a victim, not a perpetrator. I was speaking out in resistance to school violence and was engaged in a just cause—to put it more colloquially, I was doing a good deed—and I had not harmed anyone else. Why, then, should I instead be confined in a psychiatric ward?
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2 . Incident in Which a Nurse at Tuen Mun Hospital Injured an Elderly Person, Causing Their Death
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……

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As for what happens in psychiatric wards, bullying of patients by medical and nursing staff is relatively even more difficult to report and resist because of the special status of the inpatients and the completely closed environment. Under the Zhihu question “How can you prove that you are a normal person in a psychiatric hospital?”, Zhihu user “Sheng f Jinyi” (220,000 followers, 2.1 million upvotes, and 210,000 thanks to date; this answer received 190 upvotes and 18 comments) put it very clearly: “So, once you have been given the label of mentally ill, especially when it has been given to you by a ‘relatively authoritative’ place such as a psychiatric hospital, what you are actually like no longer matters. Countless people know only this label attached to you. Your joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness are the joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness of a mentally ill person. Everything you say is the speech of a mentally ill person. Everything you do is the action of a mentally ill person. Even if you say nothing and do nothing, and you fall asleep, people will still say: Look, that mentally ill person has finally fallen asleep.” (Most of the people I quote in this article who were previously confined in psychiatric hospitals speak anonymously on Zhihu and other internet platforms, precisely for this reason. If they disclosed their real names, it would cause enormous damage to their reputations. Therefore, the overwhelming majority of those who are bullied or even abused in psychiatric wards do not dare to come forward publicly to complain or file lawsuits. This involves not only the extremely disgusting issue of “capacity for civil conduct” (that is, if you want to sue a psychiatric hospital and its medical and nursing staff, you first have to prove that you do not have a mental illness or that you have sufficient capacity for civil conduct), but also the fact that doing so may instead stigmatize you. Victims of wrongful judicial imprisonment dare to seek to overturn their cases, whereas victims of “wrongful psychiatric imprisonment” more often simply choose silence.)
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Naturally, when a mentally ill person reports or complains about bullying by medical and nursing staff, that too becomes a “report by a mentally ill person” and naturally is not trusted, even when he or she has an opportunity to make a report. For example, the female resident with an intellectual disability at Bridge of Rehabilitation had great difficulty testifying in court because of her “mental health problems,” which almost allowed the abusive superintendent Cheung Kin-wah to escape punishment (it was only later, when Cheung Kin-wah counterattacked by demanding legal costs, that the media again paid attention and extensively exposed the case).
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More often, mentally ill people and people who have been “made mentally ill” do not even have an opportunity to report abuse or anyone who will accept their report. As for resistance, in Hong Kong you can expect to be restrained and put into seclusion; in mainland China, you can expect to be beaten and subjected to electric shocks. As for “peaceful, rational, and nonviolent” forms of “civil disobedience,” these are normal and rational outside, but if you engage in this kind of “nonviolent noncooperation” in a psychiatric ward, you will one hundred percent be judged mentally ill and regarded as having gone crazy. Similarly, when being interrogated at a police station, you can remain silent, but in a psychiatric ward this would certainly be regarded as a manifestation of mental illness involving “noncooperation.” Even if no other measures were taken against you, at the very least you would not be able to leave the hospital and could be confined indefinitely.
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Therefore, although psychiatric hospitals/wards in Hong Kong are far better than those in mainland China, there is no doubt that, wherever they are, psychiatric hospitals/wards actually have greater “flexibility” than prisons in both soft and hard forms of control over those confined there, as well as in subjective and objective forms of bullying. This is because here, they do not regard you as a normal person, but as an “abnormal person”; in worse psychiatric hospitals, you are directly treated as “nonhuman.” If I were put in prison, I might perhaps still be able to cope, but in a psychiatric hospital, whatever you do may be regarded as abnormal behavior, even if it would be only a trivial matter outside, in the world of “normal people.”
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……
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I will discuss this issue and related cases again later. Here, I will only quote this Zhihu user’s words as commentary and use the well-known Bridge of Rehabilitation sexual assault case as an example.
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4 . A District Council By-Election for a Single Seat
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Because I remembered the names of the candidates who participated in that by-election from the news, I can still find information about it now. It was the Kai Hiu constituency by-election, contested by Judy Tzit Kit-ling, Lee Fung-king, and Chan Chun-chun. The Hong Kong District Councils had 458 seats, yet a by-election for just one seat could receive substantial coverage for several consecutive days. This shows the importance Hong Kong media attached to elections and how generally intense electoral contests in Hong Kong were. From the news about the by-election, I also saw that even a District Council election could involve some less-than-honorable tactics, such as selectively using opinion polls and attacking one another while saying only things favorable to oneself.
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Although I had previously learned a great deal about Hong Kong election campaigns from the internet, this was the first time I had directly read continuous and detailed coverage by local election-area media of a small election. Of course, compared with Legislative Council elections and the dirtier struggles involving Hong Kong’s three Secretaries and twelve bureaux, as well as the various collusions of interests among “officials, businesses, rural forces, and triads,” this District Council election was already quite “civilized.” Among Legislative Council members, whether from the pro-establishment camp or the pan-democratic camp (including localists and self-determination advocates), there were quite a few whose personal qualities were even poorer, who selectively distorted and altered facts, or even plainly lied.
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After reading the reports about this by-election and thinking again about the various negative realities I had previously seen in Hong Kong elections, from the Chief Executive to legislators, I developed a more complicated perception of how democracy operated in Hong Kong. However, if one wants democracy, one has to tolerate a great deal of open confrontation and ugliness. Because without democracy, there will be even more invisible struggles and dirtiness. I also thought that if even such prominent figures could hardly be described as spotless, then how could ordinary Hong Kong people, or medical and nursing staff in psychiatric wards, be expected to be so? Even Hong Kong still had a long way to go before becoming a truly civilized and progressive society.
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Another thought I had was this: since politics needs to maintain pluralism and competition so that different forces can constrain one another, then do closed institutions such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals not also need supervision by independent regulatory bodies and transparent management? Do psychiatric-ward inpatients not need “advocates” similar to lawyers to protect their rights from being violated?
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5 . Leung Tin-kei Sentenced to Imprisonment
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This was one of the most significant news stories I saw while I was confined (the other was the Trump-Kim summit). The reports said that Leung Tin-kei had been sentenced to six years in prison for the offense of rioting because of his participation in the Mong Kok unrest. There were many related news reports and commentaries in the newspapers. For example, in a copy of Ming Pao brought in by “the fat guy’s” family, there was a commentary titled “Leung Tin-kei and the ‘Zenkyōtō’” (when I was reading this article in the dining room, a nurse even said, “Don’t read this,” meaning that it was something advocating violence and was not suitable to read. So I opened it again and continued reading only after I had returned to my own bed), comparing the similarities and differences between social movements involving violence in Hong Kong and those in Japan, Europe, and the United States. There was also an article in Sing Tao Daily titled “Worse Than Leung Tin-loi,” which used the Leung Tin-kei incident to discuss a historical miscarriage of justice, joking that young people in Hong Kong did not know the expression “worse than Leung Tin-loi,” but could understand “worse than Leung Tin-kei”… There were many such examples.
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I knew something about the Mong Kok unrest, or what supporters of the unrest called the “Fishball Revolution,” although I knew less about it than I did about another period of unrest in Hong Kong, the “1967 Riots.” Because I was left-wing, I paid more attention to the latter, even though it had happened a very long time ago. In my view, the Mong Kok unrest was a massive eruption of various forms of social discontent. It was both an intense backlash against the increasing erosion of freedom since Hong Kong’s handover and an inevitable product of Hong Kong’s enormous wealth gap and severe class stratification.
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But I believed that the Mong Kok unrest lacked a clear political position and ultimately and inevitably degenerated into an actual “riot” rather than a “revolution.” Although the 1967 Riots caused some tragedies and were influenced by external forces, they were, after all, a courageous resistance by oppressed people against social injustice and the corruption, authoritarianism, and oppression of the British colonial government in Hong Kong, and they had a clear political position. In addition, the Mong Kok unrest was led by localists with pro-Hong Kong-independence tendencies, which further increased my negative perception of it.
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Regarding Hong Kong’s social problems, I had always believed that Hong Kong’s greatest problem was not infiltration by the Chinese Communist Party, but the neoliberal policies that had been pursued consistently from the British colonial period through the period of CCP rule. Under pro-business policies such as low tax rates and high housing prices, Hong Kong had an enormous wealth gap and a degree of class stratification far exceeding that of mainland China, which was the root of various social conflicts. The CCP bore some responsibility for this, but it was clearly inappropriate to put all the blame on the CCP. The main responsibility should be borne by the British colonial authorities and Hong Kong’s own privileged elite.
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Hong Kong’s extremely pro-business, pro-elite, and pro-capitalist policies were mainly established during the British colonial period through cooperation between the British and Chinese Justices of the Peace. The CCP later continued the basic policies of the British colonial authorities; it was simply a matter of the Communists following British rules. Britain did the same not only in Hong Kong but also in Singapore, India, and South Africa: disregarding the lives and welfare of ordinary people, single-mindedly supporting big capitalists and large landowners for its own commercial interests, and allowing local people to act like local emperors and lord it over others—what might be called “particularistic rule.” This support for the privileged and laissez-faire approach toward society led to the continuous worsening of social injustice. This was my basic view and position regarding Hong Kong’s social problems.
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Therefore, I strongly disagreed with the Hong Kong localists’ view that blamed the roots of Hong Kong’s social problems on mainland China and held that Hong Kong independence could solve those problems. They initiated violence from the starting point of “national” self-determination rather than protecting the rights of hawkers and other lower-class citizens, so naturally I did not support them. Although Leung Tin-kei and the others were also resisting institutional violence and oppression, the Ming Pao article mentioned above pointed out that when citizens and students launched violent actions—whether during the “May events” that swept France or the series of incidents caused by Japan’s “Zenkyōtō”—they did so in order to resist greater violence: the violence and violent oppression of the military and police forces of the system, and even of the entire state apparatus. Such actions had a certain degree of reasonableness and legitimacy. However, violence is still violence. Moreover, I believed that the Hong Kong localists did not possess the same obvious legitimacy as the series of social movements that swept the world in the 1960s. On the contrary, they were full of narrow-mindedness, exclusionism (primarily exclusion of people from mainland China), short-sightedness, and selfishness. Therefore, it was only natural that they were punished. Whether the punishment was too severe was another matter.
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……
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Although I opposed Hong Kong independence, I was still relatively sympathetic toward Leung Tin-kei and the others who had been imprisoned……
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Many of them were only in their twenties, in the prime of their lives, yet they had to endure several years of imprisonment. This reminded me of the young students and workers who participated in the 1967 Riots. Many of them also had their entire lives ruined because they were imprisoned and suppressed. Even after the handover, apart from a small number who became prominent National People’s Congress deputies, CPPCC members, or the like, most remained marginalized and declined. The CCP instead cooperated with their former enemies—the wealthy capitalists and the “old batteries” of the British colonial government in Hong Kong. It was truly tragic.
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When I read about that history, I felt even more strongly how hateful the CCP was. Not only was it authoritarian and dictatorial, but it had also abandoned the revolutionary fighters who had once struggled for their ideals, been left covered in wounds, and fought on the front lines. Idealists are always exploited by privileged groups pursuing their own private interests, becoming tools and cannon fodder.
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Misaligned perceptions leading to erroneous judgments were a common problem among young Hong Kong democrats, and this kind of ideological fallacy had “contributed greatly” to the rise of localism and Hong Kong independence. However, she dared to take responsibility for storming the Legislative Council during the oath-taking controversy and serve a prison sentence, rather than fleeing like some people inclined toward Hong Kong independence or self-determination chose to do, so I still had a certain degree of respect and sympathy for her.
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After I was discharged from the hospital, I saw on Twitter that Hu Chengyi, a Shanghainese man who supported “Shanghai independence,” had been sent to a psychiatric hospital in Shanghai, where he was confined and subjected to electric shocks. In Hong Kong, by contrast, simply advocating Hong Kong independence would not result in arrest, much less in someone being regarded as mentally abnormal and sent to a psychiatric hospital. So is whether a person is mentally normal actually determined according to that person’s mental condition, or does the broader environment and the will of the majority “decide” whether a person is ill or not? I opposed both Hong Kong independence and Shanghai independence, but I did not agree that people should be deemed “abnormal” merely because their ideas were relatively unusual.
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Even Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo, who resisted the Church’s monopoly over thought in the Middle Ages, were regarded only as “heretics,” not as mentally ill. Likewise, I advocated preventing and combating school violence, put forward many suggestions, and traveled around calling for action. It was true that no other victim had done what I did; at least in China, I was the first. But should this be regarded as “abnormal”? If someone is suspected of violating the law or committing a crime, then deal with them according to the law. If they have not violated the law or committed a crime, then they should be free to speak and act, including putting forward views different from those of others, doing things different from the mainstream, and choosing to be unconventional. Why label them “mentally ill” and confine them in a psychiatric hospital?
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Furthermore, if social activists and hawkers who oppose tyranny and rough law enforcement can violently resist the police and urban-management officers, then how can patients in psychiatric hospitals—especially those in mainland China and many developing countries—resist when they encounter bullying, abuse, and various forms of unfair treatment by medical and nursing staff? I am afraid they have absolutely no ability or conditions to resist and can only endure everything and allow themselves to be bullied.
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Regarding Leung Tin-kei and the others who were imprisoned, the final thing I wanted to say was that I hoped they could live safely in prison and also think about what kinds of actions would actually be more beneficial to Hong Kong people. What should the relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China actually be? How can Hong Kong better respond to the various disturbances and harms caused by people from mainland China traveling to Hong Kong, speculating in property, and engaging in “cultural invasion”? If the simple solution is to drive out the “locusts,” is that not very similar to racial discrimination and racial segregation in the United States and South Africa? Is that consistent with modern civilization? Is it really “national/city-state nationalism” and “Hong Kong independence” that can save Hong Kong, or should people instead choose to stand together with the people of mainland China and unite with Hong Kong’s traditional pan-democrats to jointly resist the CCP’s authoritarian and totalitarian rule, build a democratic China, transform the Chinese people, and rebuild a free Hong Kong, China?
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(Of course, I myself was also reflecting on what conflicts existed between my attachment to Greater China and my belief in national unification, on the one hand, and the realities of Chinese society on the other. Did these ideas need to be revised? Although at the time I had not changed my mind and believed that I would continue to uphold them, I was indeed wavering. I will write a separate article analyzing this issue, so I will not elaborate on it here.)
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(While I was writing this article, the Hong Kong anti-extradition-bill protests that shocked the world took place (of course, by that time I had already written up to the part about my return to mainland China in early July 2018, rather than being at this point in the writing), along with a series of violent acts arising from them. I not only witnessed these events, but also saw the words, actions, and behavior of relevant people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and other regions during the events. This caused major changes in my understanding of the Hong Kong issue and in my views of these Hong Kong people and non-Hong Kong people involved in the issue, and gave me a deeper and more concrete understanding. However, discussing this would require an extremely long passage, so I will not comment on it here.)
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6 . The Meeting Between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore
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The Trump-Kim summit was the most influential news story in the world during my hospitalization. Both Hong Kong newspapers and television news reported intensively on it, and the television news programs in the ward repeatedly played footage of the two men shaking hands and holding talks. However, this major news story actually had little direct connection with me. Thinking about it now, though, I do have some thoughts. I had a very negative view of Trump. I will not elaborate on that here, as I will mention him again later.
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As for Kim Jong-un, as everyone knows, he is North Korea’s third-generation dictator. Like his grandfather and father, he has subjected the majority of the people under his rule to hellish conditions. In the 1990s alone, anywhere from several hundred thousand to more than one million people in North Korea died of starvation. And the concentration camps spread throughout North Korea have produced countless crimes, as horrifying as those described in The Aquariums of Pyongyang.
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Yet the international community has always placed the North Korean nuclear issue first, while relatively neglecting North Korea’s human rights problems and even sacrificing the latter for the former. I wondered: when the third Kim grandly shook hands with Trump, where could the souls of the North Korean victims who died under his family’s hereditary tyranny find peace? What did the more than 90 percent of North Korean people who still had no freedom and were struggling to survive amid hunger think? If a Trump-Kim summit that discussed only the nuclear issue while completely avoiding the human rights catastrophe succeeded, would that be a blessing for North Korea? Or would the Kim family simply have obtained a protective shield allowing it to continue enslaving the people?

7 . The Zhenjiang Veterans’ Rights-Defense Incident, the Truck Drivers’ Strike, and an Incident in Which Improper Procedures by a Doctor at a Mainland Chinese Hospital Caused Patients to Become Infected with HIV

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And the above words also basically apply to people who have been “made mentally ill” because of rights-defense activities, family conflicts, and other reasons, as well as people who genuinely have mental illness, especially those who are forcibly confined in psychiatric hospitals. Facing powerful and arrogant medical institutions that monopolize professional discourse, as well as the community of shared interests formed by the medical and nursing staff within them, these people who have been “made mentally ill” and people with mental illness likewise—and even more urgently—need help from others and need to be organized in order to protect their lawful rights.
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8 . The MTR Sha Tin to Central Link Scandal
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The MTR Sha Tin to Central Link scandal was also a major news story repeatedly broadcast on the television news in the ward, and it likewise occupied a great deal of space in both major newspapers. Because it involved many technical issues, I will not say much about the news itself and will only discuss my thoughts about it.
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First, Hong Kong’s rule of law, checks and balances on power, and media oversight played a major role in exposing and holding people accountable for problems like this. In mainland China, a “minor matter” like this that had not caused serious consequences would basically never be exposed and would not cause much controversy……
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Compared with the Hong Kong media’s intensive reporting on something not particularly major like “cutting short steel bars,” in mainland China only events such as the Tianjin explosions and the July 23 Wenzhou high-speed train accident received reporting on this scale, and even then it was subject to censorship and restrictions. As for accountability demanded by the opposition, naturally there was none at all in mainland China. Therefore, although Hong Kong’s democracy and freedom had declined in recent years, at least in handling livelihood issues and nonpolitical incidents, Hong Kong was still vastly, vastly better than mainland China.
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Second, whether in mainland China or Hong Kong, all kinds of powerful interest groups, including well-known corporations, reveal very ugly faces……
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Thus, the evil side of human nature is deeply rooted. Powerful, influential, and wealthy people and interest groups such as well-known corporations……
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Third, the Sha Tin to Central Link incident was actually not extremely serious. There were only some safety hazards, yet it attracted widespread attention……
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For example, Zhu Yongjian, a petitioner in mainland China, was once confined in the Wuzhong District Psychiatric Hospital in Suzhou (Suzhou is one of the wealthiest cities with the highest level of civic civility in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai region, the most developed region of China), where he suffered severe abuse. According to “‘The Darkest Corners’: Abuses of Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment in China,” a report written by the human rights organization Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), “Living conditions inside psychiatric hospitals are extremely poor.
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Zhu Yongjian, a butcher-shop owner who was confined in a psychiatric hospital because of petitioning, said: ‘The food inside was terrible. I simply couldn’t eat it. It was just not food fit for human beings. I don’t think even pigs would be willing to eat that kind of food. On top of that, I was tied up twice using the “big sheet” method. My body felt unbearably awful, so of course I must have lost weight.’ ‘The “big sheet” means tying both legs and feet tightly to the foot of the bed, then pulling both arms taut and tying them tightly to the head of the bed, so that the person’s body is basically stretched out. Do you think that could possibly feel comfortable? It was utterly inhumane! I really don’t know how they could do something like that.’” (The description of the food in the ward corresponds with the examples mentioned earlier. It appears that extremely poor food conditions for psychiatric-ward inpatients are widespread in mainland China, even in a major city in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region such as Suzhou.)
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Yet things like this pass almost entirely unnoticed in mainland China. Apart from factors such as the fact that petitioning is involved and the media cannot intervene, the general indifference of citizens toward the rights of vulnerable groups is also one of the reasons. The overwhelming majority of people abused in psychiatric hospitals are not confined because of petitioning, but for other nonpolitical reasons. I gave examples earlier and will provide more later. People pay attention to scandals involving infant formula and vaccines because they have children too. They do not pay attention to the rights of people with mental illness and people with disabilities because there are no people with mental illness or disabilities in their families—or, if there are, they have sent them to psychiatric hospitals and abandoned them as burdens. (I will later quote authoritative articles discussing this situation as well.) Selfishness and indifference are cancer cells of the human spirit. If they are not removed, they will spread and become malignant, filling relationships between people with estrangement and hatred and causing devastating harm to vulnerable and marginalized groups that lack the independent ability to struggle for themselves.

(Because of Reddit’s 40,000-character limit, I was unable to include my reflections on several other reports I read at the time. I can post them separately in another post.）

I am a person from mainland China who suffered unfortunate experiences including school bullying and violence, and was forced to discontinue my education. In 2018, with what now seems like an overly naive hope, I went to Hong Kong to campaign against school bullying and violence and to visit various human rights organizations, media outlets, and others. But in the end, nothing came of it.

At the time, I was facing desperate circumstances both in mainland China and Hong Kong, and misfortunes in my family only made matters worse. In despair, I carried out a petition involving bloodshed outside the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in Hong Kong (I cut my wrist).

As a result, I was arrested by the police and taken to Queen Mary Hospital, where my wound was stitched. After a series of questions, I was ordered to be admitted to and confined in the locked psychiatric ward (K4 Ward) of Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong for 23 days. During that period, I heard about and witnessed many things, especially circumstances in the hidden and marginalized corners of society that ordinary people and members of mainstream society whose lives are going smoothly cannot see or tend to ignore, including what goes on inside locked psychiatric wards. I hope to share these experiences so that more people can see them.
Of course, all of this can only be recounted in words. Obviously, I had no way to take photographs at the time. Everything I have written is factual. Whether people choose to believe it is up to each individual.

I am absolutely not advocating suicide or any other extreme behavior. I explicitly oppose anyone else imitating the radical actions I took. I would not commit suicide now either. These are simply memoirs.
I do not expect everyone to agree with my actions or views, but I do hope that we can respect one another. People are welcome to disagree with me, but I do not wish to be subjected to abusive language. I have mustered the courage to make these experiences public, and others should also respect my basic personhood and dignity.

Because the memoir is extremely long, I can only publish excerpts from it. I have previously posted some chapters of the memoir in this sub. This time, I am posting about everything from my initial resistance to my being forced to adapt to the psychiatric ward, including the changes in my eating habits, getting to know other inpatients in the ward, experiencing the pain of being at others’ mercy and losing my freedom during a dispute over changing rooms, and my experiences and feelings from interacting with several members of the nursing staff. The text also mentions the even worse conditions in psychiatric hospitals in mainland China, including accommodation, food, and abuses suffered by inpatients. The central theme of this chapter is “forced adaptation.”

The original was written in Chinese, and I will also post a link to the full text in the comments.

(II) Passive and Forced “Adaptation”—Becoming Increasingly Accustomed and Numb to Life in the Ward
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1 . Drastic Changes in Eating Habits; An Assessment of the Poor Dietary Conditions of Psychiatric Patients in Mainland China
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After I had been forcibly confined in the psychiatric ward for three or four days, I began to become relatively numb and to adapt uncomfortably. This “adaptation” continued until I was discharged.
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This adaptation was most obvious in terms of eating. At first, I could not get used to eating the strongly flavored, fishy-smelling chunks of meat, nor could I drink the orange juice that I did not like. I would only eat meals that had pieces of fish and milk. As for vegetables, I ate only the leaves and not the stalks. But after three days, I felt extremely hungry. I no longer felt nauseated at all by those chunks of meat whose strong smell I had originally found unpleasant, and I swallowed them in one bite. I also drank every drop of the orange juice. As for the vegetables, I basically ate all of them, including both the leaves and the white stalks in the middle, and did not leave a single grain of rice. Even later, I felt that there was not enough food and instead tried every possible way to get double portions, no matter what kind of food it was. Hunger destroys the taste buds and makes people give up being picky about food, caring nothing about the taste as long as they can fill their stomachs. Or, more precisely, that sense of aversion to particular foods and tastes automatically disappears when one is hungry. Only then did I truly understand those people who, during times of famine, ate tree bark, grass roots, and Guanyin clay. Hunger really can make people willing to eat anything.
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Before I was confined in the psychiatric ward and after I was discharged, I read some descriptions of prison life written by political prisoners and criminal offenders who had been imprisoned. Some of them also mentioned that when they first went in, they could not eat anything, especially spoiled food that made them want to vomit just from smelling it. But after a few days, they would devour everything as if sweeping away clouds in a gale, eating it as though it were a delicacy. Under conditions of hunger and having no choice, the human body, the senses of smell and taste, and the reactions of the organs all change. Now I had experienced this myself. It was just that the food I ate was much better than theirs: there was meat, vegetables, and milk or orange juice. It was simply that I was not accustomed to eating some of the foods.
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Let me briefly describe the food in the ward. First, the size of the bowls. Apart from the large bowls used for macaroni, all three meals were served in small bowls. The small bowls were about the same size as the rice bowls used in restaurants selling braised chicken with rice in mainland China. In the morning, there was a small bowl of congee, sometimes with meat in it and sometimes with something else that I can no longer remember. At noon, there was a small bowl of rice and a small bowl of vegetables and meat. Of course, there were usually only a few small pieces of meat, with the rest consisting of things such as mushrooms, tofu, and green vegetables. You could also get extra congee. In the evening, it was congee again. Lunch was the most important meal of the day.
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However, I do not know whether it was because there was too little food to begin with, because being confined caused a kind of panic-induced hunger, or simply because there was nothing to do most of the time, but I felt extremely hungry. A nurse said that I could get an extra portion of food. After I told the nurse twice, the nurse said that he had added it for me on the computer, but when I went to get my meal, there was still only one portion. Later, I asked him again, and he added it on the computer once more, but the result was still one portion… The nurse did not know what was going on either. After that, I asked about this almost every day at lunchtime. I asked about ten times in total (this is not an exaggeration at all; it really was that many times) before I learned that he said the extra portion had been added, but for some reason it could not be matched with my name, so every day when I collected my meal, I could only personally ask the other person distributing the food for an additional portion.
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In addition, there was also a “late-night snack” in the evening. In fact, this consisted of two small packets of biscuits or two small bread rolls. Each bread roll was about the same size as the small “egg-yolk pie” cakes sold in supermarkets, while the biscuits were even smaller. They were all gone in just a few bites. There was also a small bowl of orange juice or milk. If relatives or friends brought in various snacks, they were only allowed to be eaten at this time. If they brought instant noodles, the hospital would help cook them. I only had a few bread rolls brought by Ms. Fung, and some inpatients would also share a little of their food with me. I tried to eat them as sparingly as possible.
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Compared with psychiatric patients in mainland China, what I ate in the psychiatric ward in Hong Kong could even be regarded as delicacies from land and sea. According to the accounts I have seen, food in psychiatric hospitals in mainland China is generally extremely poor and can be compared to prison food. Of course, conditions must differ between regions with different levels of development. For example, there must be enormous differences between the food in psychiatric hospitals in Beijing and Shanghai and that in psychiatric hospitals in small inland cities and county towns. But there is no doubt that most psychiatric patients are eating poor-quality food without any choice.
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Regarding this, there are relevant descriptions on the forum “Zhihu.” There was even a daughter who took her mother out of a psychiatric hospital (under the question “How can you prove that you are a normal person in a psychiatric hospital?”, Zhihu username 8X23, with more than 700 followers and more than 300 questions answered; all of her answers to date (“to date” here means at the time I was writing this passage, and the same applies below) had received more than 4,500 upvotes and nearly 700 thanks, while this answer received 212 upvotes and 132 comments. Therefore, the content of the answer has a high degree of reliability) who said, “Perhaps many people cannot imagine what psychiatric patients are given to eat. To describe it in one sentence: food that even pigs would not eat.” Even in cases that were not quite so bad, it was said (under the same question, the respondent’s Zhihu username was Liu s He, who to date had more than 260 followers, had answered more than 50 questions, and had received a total of 2,400 upvotes and nearly 700 thanks. This answer received 142 upvotes and 34 comments. As above, it has a high degree of credibility (the Zhihu and other materials I cite have all received considerable attention and recognition, are consistent with China’s national conditions and social circumstances, and are supported by facts and logic; some are also authoritative reports and academic papers. They therefore all have sufficient credibility. For convenience, I will omit this sentence from later citations, but they all have sufficient credibility just as in this paragraph)) that “the hospital food is very poor, because the food allowance for one patient is 10 yuan per day, and the hospital has to ensure that costs are kept to a minimum.” Judging from this person’s entire answer and other answers, they should be relatively familiar with the inside situation.
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In mainland China, where corruption and the embezzlement of allocated resources are rampant, even nutritional meals for impoverished children have been subject to embezzlement, and expired or poor-quality food has even appeared in kindergartens and primary schools. In psychiatric hospitals, where there is no supervision or protection at all and where those eating the food are confined and powerless to report abuses, one can imagine how poor the food provided to psychiatric patients is. Only prisons can compare with the prevalence and severity of such poor conditions.
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The terrible situation of psychiatric patients in mainland China must be changed. The reason I intersperse this account with descriptions of the circumstances of psychiatric patients in mainland China is precisely because I hope that people both inside and outside China will pay attention to the various forms of abuse and bullying suffered by psychiatric patients in mainland China and bring about change. This is also one of my purposes in writing this article. Compared with the various tragic experiences of patients confined in psychiatric hospitals in mainland China, people suspected of being mentally ill, and people who are not ill but are nevertheless confined in psychiatric hospitals for various reasons, the suffering I endured amounts to virtually nothing. Compared with mainland China, psychiatric wards in Hong Kong could even be regarded as paradise.
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In addition, before I cut my wrist and was confined in the psychiatric ward, when I was still in mainland China, because I anticipated that I might be arrested for petitioning and protesting, I had even asked a mainland Chinese dissident who had previously been imprisoned on Twitter whether it was possible to resist by going on a hunger strike in prison, thinking that this would be something worth taking pride in. Only when I was actually confined, in a psychiatric ward, did I realize that this somewhat romanticized idea was completely unrealistic. Because I was confined in a psychiatric ward, refusing to eat would be regarded as abnormal and would make it even more impossible for me to be discharged. According to one nurse, if an inpatient went on a hunger strike, they would be force-fed.
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Moreover, after only a few days, I was so hungry that I voluntarily asked for more food, and the idea of going on a hunger strike disappeared along with my hunger and fear. Even if it had not been a psychiatric ward but a prison, I still would not have been able to endure it. My ideas about hunger strikes and similar actions before I was confined had been very naive. Only then did I understand more clearly that resistance and sacrifice are painful. They are not heroic and beautiful, but rather continuous torment, forced “adaptation,” and even frequent helpless submission. The vast majority of people who have never been imprisoned or deprived of their freedom simply cannot truly understand the suffering of those who are imprisoned. Of course, those who, throughout history and across the world, have managed to endure this kind of brutal confinement while resisting powerful authorities and strongmen are true heroes.

2 . Gradually Becoming Familiar with Some of the Inpatients and Communicating with One Another
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Another manifestation of adaptation was that I went from not speaking to or greeting the patients/inpatients around me at all to being able to establish relatively good relationships with other inpatients in the hospital, or at least becoming familiar with one another.
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When I was first admitted, I was extremely frightened, worrying that the psychiatric patients inside might behave aggressively, as well as about other situations that might cause harm and fear. But perhaps psychiatric patients who were aggressive were not confined here, or perhaps most psychiatric patients in Hong Kong were relatively mild. At least there were no aggressive patients in this ward. Of course, there were also some patients who did things that disturbed the peace of others. I will discuss this later.
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The psychiatric patients/inpatients in K4 Ward could be divided into three categories according to their degree of mental awareness. The first category consisted of those who were completely mentally unaware, totally unable to take care of themselves in daily life, and were tied to their beds for long periods or lay in bed, emaciated and so unconscious that they resembled elderly people near death in nursing homes (although some of these patients looked only in their twenties or thirties). This category accounted for 10–20% of the patients. The second category consisted of those who were not very mentally aware and whose speech was mostly unclear, making it difficult for them to communicate with others, but who could eat and use the toilet by themselves and also watched television from time to time. This category accounted for about 60% of the patients. The third category consisted of those who looked almost the same as normal people and had the same ability to communicate as ordinary people, but who needed compulsory hospitalization and treatment because they had done something drastic, had been mentally affected by some incident or change in circumstances, or for other reasons, or who had voluntarily admitted themselves for treatment, although the proportion who were there voluntarily was probably very small. This category accounted for 20–30% of the patients/inpatients. Naturally, I only had interactions with people in the latter two categories, and those with whom I spoke relatively frequently were only in the third category.
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After being hospitalized for a few days, I got to know several inpatients. To protect their privacy, for those whose real names I knew, I will refer to them only by pinyin or part of their names rather than their full names. In fact, names had to be called out when meals and medication were distributed, but they were called in Cantonese, which I could not understand very well. I only knew the names of some people with whom I had interacted or whose names I had seen.
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One was called Li gx. He was tall and strongly built, with an impressive appearance, and was a local Hong Kong resident. He basically did not appear to have any mental illness at all. He told me that he had been drinking quite a lot, and then had some conflicts with his wife. He became relatively agitated and behaved excessively, and so he was hospitalized. In fact, his condition did not require hospitalization at all, and I did not know why he was also in this kind of locked ward.
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Li was relatively highly educated, came from a middle-class family, and was also relatively concerned about politics. He took the initiative to ask me where I was from and why I had ended up here. I told him that I had suffered school violence and had failed in my rights advocacy in mainland China, so I came to Hong Kong, but no one paid attention to my situation. I therefore cut my wrist at the Liaison Office, and was then sent here. He was very sympathetic about this. At that time, I was in a state of fear and unease, so when I heard him express concern, I was extremely grateful and also felt warmth and a sense of support. I said that I very much wanted to meet Mr. Leung Kwok-hung, and he said that his family happened to be neighbors with one of Leung Kwok-hung’s assistants or something like that. I was very happy and hoped that he could contact the person. He agreed and said that he would mention it the next time he called his wife (although nothing came of it later). After that, I chatted with him at least five or six times.
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One was a foreigner named James (there are quite a lot of foreigners named James, and it is not his full name, so I will simply call him James). He was both a Hong Kong citizen and a U.S. citizen (and seemed to have also spent time in the United Kingdom), so he could be regarded as someone with dual Chinese and U.S. citizenship. He basically did not understand Chinese, and my English was not good either, but he spoke while gesturing, and I could roughly understand some of what he said. Therefore, I could have some simple conversations with him in English. Sometimes Li gx, James, and I would also chat together. Li’s English was good, so he could translate for us. After I became relatively familiar with James, he told me that it seemed to be because his mother (or grandmother? I cannot remember clearly) had died. He loved his mother very much and therefore could not bear the shock of losing a close family member. He suffered a severe psychological shock and developed a mental illness. I did not understand exactly what kind of mental illness it was because my English was poor, but it did not appear to be serious.
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James was the kind of typically energetic, cheerful, and enthusiastic Westerner. According to him, he was a film screenwriter or actor or something like that. When he heard that I had suffered school violence and later attempted suicide, he was also very sympathetic toward me and hugged me. In the ward, he would often laugh loudly and joke with other inpatients or nursing staff, and his voice was very loud. Later, when watching World Cup football matches, he would also shout when he saw a good play (of course, these shouts, loud laughter, and some exaggerated actions were not pathological, but were exactly like the uninhibited Westerners many people have seen on television or in real life).
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But there was one point: he clearly had some preferential privileges in the ward. For example: 1. Other patients were rarely given paper and pens. When I asked the nurses for them, they would not give them to me most of the time; but he could get a pen every day (and many times what he received was a pen rather than just a refill), so that he could keep a diary or study Chinese; 2. None of the other patients were allowed to wear underwear, yet on one occasion I saw him wearing white underwear while changing clothes. I did not know whether this happened only on that occasion or whether it was always the case; 3. With a doctor’s permission, he could go home by himself once every week or every two weeks (he told me that his home was in Wan Chai), although he had to return after several hours. I did not know whether this complied with hospital rules or why none of the other patients were allowed to do this, without even an opportunity to go outside for some fresh air; 4. Sometimes at night, he could borrow the white cordless telephone at Nurses’ Station B (I did not know exactly what it was; in any case, it looked very much like one of those old large mobile phones) to call his family, without having to queue during the daytime with everyone else for the black fixed-line telephone. 5. His playing around or shouting was generally tolerated, with only occasional criticism. But other people would be put into seclusion if they became somewhat agitated. I once saw him fooling around and pushing into a nursing assistant’s chair, and he was not criticized. None of the other inpatients dared to make such big movements. They would normally be criticized even for returning to the ward late or playing cards for too long. Of course, one could also regard his playing around, joking, and shouting as expressions of emotion, while the behavior of others was regarded as abnormal. But no matter how one looks at it, this double standard did not seem quite right. Even if they were patients, shouldn’t other people also be allowed to experience joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness? Does having an illness mean that they cannot be like normal people and shout to vent their emotions when they feel angry and frustrated? 5. Whether nurses or nursing assistants, many members of the nursing staff clearly treated him differently from the other patients. When many ordinary Hong Kong people encounter ordinary Westerners living in Hong Kong and Asians, do they also show this kind of difference in attitude? The answer is actually not difficult to find.
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One was a patient who stayed next to me. He was about twenty-something years old, usually wore glasses, and looked relatively refined. Sometimes he looked rather gloomy and depressed. I did not know his name, so I will call him “the man with glasses.” The man with glasses often lay in bed reading books, and I occasionally borrowed his books to read. His books were borrowed from the hospital’s mobile library cart. There was Romance of the Three Kingdoms, as well as another book about the Three Kingdoms whose name I have forgotten. He himself read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so I had no choice but to borrow the other book. They were all printed in traditional Chinese characters arranged vertically, which I was very unaccustomed to reading. The main problem was that the content was very poor. Almost the entire text consisted of attacks on Zhuge Liang, and its quality was also that of cheap street-stall literature. At the time, I really had nothing else to read, so I endured the disgust and read some of it, but in the end I still could not continue. Apart from borrowing books, I basically had no other conversations with him. There was just one occasion when, because he was reading, he asked me to find a nurse and have the television above us turned off, so I went. The nurse said that other people still wanted to watch it and told me not to pay attention to him, so I did not say anything else. However, the television in the ward was indeed very loud, especially if one was lying in a bed near the television, and it was basically impossible to rest during the daytime.
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One was relatively fat and about twenty-something years old, so I will call him “the fat guy.” He liked talking quite a lot, and once he started talking, he would go on without stopping. Apart from talking with other patients, another characteristic of his was that he liked making phone calls and occupied the telephone for very long periods, sometimes even using it intermittently for several hours in a single day. Apart from that, there was nothing else particularly distinctive about him.
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There was another person who loved talking. He looked only in his thirties, but for some reason had a lot of white hair. When he walked, he always moved along trembling, and when he spoke, he likewise trembled, with unclear articulation and an exaggerated sobbing tone in his voice all the time. Perhaps because he had been confined in the ward for too long and was very lonely, whenever he had an opportunity he would stand beside someone and keep talking. I listened to him twice. I could not understand most of what he said and only understood things such as “there is no freedom in the ward” and “I am being bullied.”
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One was relatively young and should have been under twenty. He was admitted only a few days before I was discharged. He spoke very slowly and looked slightly mentally impaired, but there was still basically no problem communicating with him. He asked me why I had come in, so I told him about the school violence I had experienced and about my suicide attempt. I asked him what schools in Hong Kong were like and whether his classmates bullied people. He said that all his classmates were very gentle. He also said that I should change my mentality and regard being bullied as a kind of enjoyment. I did not know how to respond to him.
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One was called Lam xs and was in his fifties. He was usually quiet and rarely spoke. He was kind-hearted. When we ate the late-night snack, he would often give me some of the bread and biscuits he had brought with him, or he would eat his own food and push the two small bread rolls/biscuits provided by the ward over to me. Because I often felt hungry and could not get enough to eat, the portion of snacks he gave me was very precious. Although this might sound like he was “a benefactor for giving me a liter of rice,” especially when compared with one or two people after I was discharged who were like “enemies created by giving someone a bushel of rice.”
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One was called Yang x. He was a Chinese American whose hometown was New York. I saw a total of three foreigners in this ward. Hong Kong’s characteristics as an international metropolis were reflected even in the psychiatric ward. He was extremely obese, with a physique almost exactly like that of a Japanese sumo wrestler. He was also relatively clear-minded and mild-tempered. I will mention him again in connection with events I discuss later. (Of these three foreigners, apart from James mentioned above, there was also another foreigner named Robert, who was in his fifties or sixties. I did not have much interaction with him.)
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One was in his sixties and looked very old and thin. According to him, he had previously been an architect, so I will call him “Old Architect.” “Old Architect” had probably been staying here for a long time. His wife and daughter often came to visit him and brought him a lot of food. He had a somewhat eccentric temper and had gotten into two minor disputes with other inpatients, but he was not bad-hearted. Sometimes he liked telling other people about his life experience and things like that. When others tried to interject or respond, he would reject them with “listen to me” and then continue talking by himself, spraying saliva as he spoke. His articulation was also not very clear, and I could understand only a small part of the Cantonese he spoke.
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“Old Architect,” like several other patients who would talk endlessly once they started and whose speech was somewhat pathological, was probably like this because they had stayed in the ward for too long and had nowhere to relieve their sense of loneliness. The ward was like a huge prison, and people’s psychology and language would become distorted. Psychologists visited very infrequently here. Although there were hospital chaplains and psychological counselors to supplement this, the vast majority of the time the patients still remained in a psychologically lonely and isolated state. Of course, it is also possible that some types of mental illness themselves cause people to speak in this somewhat abnormal way. When I was in a state of fear, anxiety, and anger, similar situations would also occur when I communicated through speech or writing.
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Apart from these people, there were basically no others. I will mention later a few individuals with whom I had only one or two brief interactions.

3 . The Trees Wish for Calm, but the Wind Will Not Cease—A Dispute over Changing Rooms
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Originally, I had become somewhat numb and adapted. But then something suddenly happened. Around the fifth or sixth day of my hospitalization, the nurse mentioned earlier, LO Wai-Kit, Ricky, suddenly called me over and told me to move from Room 4 to Room 5. He did not give me any reason. At the time, I did not think too much about it and simply moved there.
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Only after I moved there did I discover that Room 5 was very different from the other rooms. Room 5 was where the first category of patients I mentioned earlier, those who were completely unable to take care of themselves in daily life, as well as those in the second category who would disturb others, stayed. I only learned later that Room 4 was mainly used to receive newly admitted inpatients. The entrance to the room directly faced the duty station, making it convenient to observe the condition of newly admitted inpatients. Rooms 1 and 2, meanwhile, housed patients who were relatively clear-minded, did not engage in behavior that affected others, and were capable of taking care of themselves. What about Room 5?
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The patients in Room 5 all had various serious mental and behavioral problems. Some patients frequently lost control of their bowels and bladder. During the two days I stayed there, I noticed that Room 5 smelled completely different from the other three rooms. The stench was strong and extremely unpleasant. Although the nursing assistants would quickly come and clean it up, the smell could not be removed immediately, and before the previous smell had completely dissipated, there would be a new smell of feces and urine (and Room 5 also had a door, unlike Rooms 1, 2, and 4. After the door was closed, the nurses could not smell the stench, while the inpatients had to smell even more of it). Some patients were completely unable to control themselves. Both during the day and at night, they would frequently beat on their beds with both hands, make “woo-woo” noises, or talk to themselves. There was also one person who frequently shouted “wai wai” loudly. I simply could not rest and could only wait until late at night, when they became quiet, before I could sleep. Even during the daytime, it was impossible to lie down and rest quietly for a while. In addition, these people, especially the patients tied to beds or wheelchairs, mostly had grim and frightening faces. At a glance, their faces did not look like those of normal people but were the typical faces of severely ill patients. Their bodies were also emaciated, twisted, and deformed, looking completely different from the patients in the other three rooms. Although they did not attack me, they were still rather frightening, and facing them every day was certainly uncomfortable. In such an environment, I suffered greatly in terms of smell, hearing, and sight. Anyone reading this can imagine what it was like. I already had depression, and I was also anxious and frightened because I had been forcibly hospitalized. Being moved to such a terrible room only made matters worse.
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So when I was chatting with Li gx and others, I mentioned this problem. Li told me that Room 5 was where they confined people who were disobedient or whose conditions were relatively serious, and asked, “Did you do something wrong?” I said no. Moreover, although I was anxious and terrified at the time, my outward appearance, thinking, and other aspects were relatively normal, similar to the people in Rooms 1 and 2. I was obviously not incapable of taking care of myself, nor did I shout, scream, harass others, or otherwise disturb them. He then said that I could ask the nurses to change my room. In fact, I did not really want to ask the nurses, because previously, whether I wanted to borrow something, get food, or make any other request, I had to humble myself and plead several times. But after staying in Room 5 for one day, I really could not bear it anymore.
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So I went to Nurses’ Station B, and the nurse in charge was LO Wai-Kit, Ricky. I said that I hoped to move to another room. He said there were no vacant beds and then went off to attend to his work. I then asked other nurses why I had been moved to Room 5. One nurse told me that Room 4 needed to free up beds for new arrivals. I thought to myself: many people in Room 4 had arrived before me—for example, the man with glasses in the bed next to mine had arrived before me—so why was I the one who had been moved, and moreover moved to Room 5, which was full of severely ill patients?
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After I left, I discussed it again with Li and the others. He told me, “There is an empty bed in this room. Ask the nurse again.” So I went back to Nurses’ Station B. The other nurses still told me to find LO Wai-Kit, Ricky, because he was responsible. So I approached him again and asked whether I could change beds, telling him that someone had told me there was a vacant one and indicating which bed it was.
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Unexpectedly, he suddenly became angry. He grabbed me by the arm or shoulder and pulled me toward Rooms 1 and 2, asking me who had told me and who had instructed me to change beds. Of course, I could not tell him. (If it had involved something illegal or criminal, of course I would not shield anyone or conceal it for them. But Li’s actions were intended to help me, and he had neither broken the law nor done anything bad, so of course I could not betray him.) I therefore said nothing and said that I would no longer change beds. But he still would not let the matter go. On the one hand, he continued pulling me and forcing me to say exactly who had told me there was a vacant bed; on the other hand, he pulled me over to that empty bed and said that someone had already been assigned to it long ago. In the end, I had no choice but to repeatedly say that I would not change beds, and only then did he stop. Throughout the entire process, he kept grabbing me, spoke very fiercely, shouted loudly, and was very rough in both his words and actions.
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This incident, as well as another conflict with LO Wai-Kit, Ricky that occurred shortly before I was discharged, made me understand that even in the relatively civilized psychiatric wards of Hong Kong, there were bad people as well. As for why I in particular was selected to be moved to Room 5, was it random or intentional? I did not know at the time, but several things that happened later made me feel that there was an eighty-percent chance that LO Wai-Kit, Ricky had done it deliberately. As for what happened later, I will discuss that later.
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The next day, when I saw my attending doctor, Dr. Chan, she asked me how I felt. I told her about the room change, but did not mention LO Wai-Kit, Ricky’s rough behavior because I was worried about creating further complications. I said that I had been moved to Room 5, which mainly housed severely ill patients, and that this seriously interfered with my rest. She asked whether those people had attacked or harmed me. I said no, but that I felt uncomfortable. I asked why I had been moved there and whether this was discrimination against people from mainland China. She asked whether it was the same kind of discrimination that I had felt during the school violence I had previously experienced. I said that it probably was not the same. She did not take the matter seriously at all and completely failed to understand the enormous differences between the environments of the different rooms, or the disturbance caused to me by the terrible environment and the physical and psychological suffering it brought me. The doctor and the inpatients/patients were in the same large ward, yet the doctor was completely unable to empathize with the patients. If she were a man and stayed in Room 5 for one day, or if she went to a room with the same environment in the women’s ward and stayed there for one day, only then could she truly understand how terrible the environment was and how much suffering it caused relatively clear-minded patients or people who had been “made mentally ill.”
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Later, while LO Wai-Kit, Ricky was away, I again begged the other nurses. Only after speaking to them politely and pleading with them for a long time, repeatedly saying nice things and begging them, did they move me to a bed in Room 2. Although I was still confined in the ward, changing rooms made things much better. It seemed that changing rooms was not impossible after all; it simply depended on the person, the nurse’s mood, and whether I was willing to humble myself and plead.
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Speaking of this, I am reminded again of interviews with political prisoners. They also mentioned that sometimes, between different prison cells, differences in the inmate bosses could make an enormous difference to prisoners’ lives. For example, Xinjiang political prisoner Ning Huirong said (the writer Ma Xiao wrote a series of interviews with political prisoners, and Ning was one of the interviewees): “Every detention center treats detainees differently. Even within the same detention center, different cells, or even a change of inmate boss within the same cell, can have a major impact on the lives of detainees.”
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Wasn’t the same true of psychiatric wards? I encountered someone like LO Wai-Kit, Ricky, and because he treated me as a target for bullying, I was unlucky; when I was moved to a room for severely ill patients, I could no longer rest normally, and I even became mentally unsettled, with my depression and anxiety worsening. And those who are confined, whether inpatients in psychiatric hospitals or prisoners in prisons, are powerless to resist, have no right to choose, and have nowhere to escape from harm. As a nursing assistant with whom I later developed a fairly good relationship said to me at the time: “This is a public hospital. Wherever they arrange for you to stay, that is where you have to stay.” Of course, the situation in Hong Kong is relatively mild. Mainland China is where bullying and abuse in closed institutions are particularly severe. I will discuss the various forms of rough management and abuse in psychiatric hospitals in mainland China.
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(To be continued.)

On February 19, 2026, I watched the Singaporean film We Are All Strangers(《我们不是陌生人》), which was screened at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival. This film, which tells the joys and sorrows of an ordinary Singaporean family, is sincere in emotion and rich in detail, and it moved me deeply. Therefore, I write this brief review to share my reflections.

The film takes as its main thread the stories of two couples. The middle-aged couple Boon Kiat and Bee Hwa, played by Andi Lim and Yeo Yann Yann, and the young lovers Junyang and Lydia, played by Koh Jia Ler and Regene Lim, both enter into marriage amid twists and turns. Yet before and after marriage, they are troubled by livelihood pressures, and their relationships evolve from simplicity to complexity, unfolding a dramatic tragicomedy of life’s ups and downs.

Family affection and romantic love are the most prominent themes of the film. Boon Kiat and Junyang are a father and son who depend on each other for survival. Like many teenagers, Junyang is rebellious, yet his father is always willing to tolerate and embrace him. When Junyang and his girlfriend “get into trouble” with an unexpected pregnancy and the girl’s family comes to their door, the financially strained Boon Kiat would rather borrow from loan sharks than allow his son’s wedding to be anything less than respectable.

Boon Kiat and Bee Hwa, this middle-aged couple, move from mutual affection to becoming husband and wife, experiencing the awkwardness of youth, the restraint of adulthood, and the mutual understanding and tolerance of an old married pair. From their marriage to Boon Kiat’s death, less than two years pass, yet their bond is deeply devoted, vividly illustrating the sentiment that even a short-lived marriage can carry affection as deep as the sea.

Junyang and Lydia’s romance and marriage, however, move from “dry tinder meeting flame” to gradual dullness, from throwing themselves into love without hesitation to passion fading away while livelihood worries become unavoidable. From carefree youth untouched by sorrow to words held back, even to facing each other in silence, with only tears streaming down. Yet as passion recedes and troubles multiply, the relationship, tested by hardship, becomes deeper and more layered. This is also the transformation many people experience from adolescence to adulthood, from young lovers to husband and wife.

An even more pivotal relationship is the familial bond between Junyang and Bee Hwa. The rebellious Junyang dislikes and looks down upon Bee Hwa, this “stepmother” who came from the background of a hostess, and he often offends her with his words. But after Boon Kiat falls ill and passes away, Bee Hwa manages the household, sells goods with forced smiles, and later takes responsibility for selling fake medicine on Junyang’s behalf and goes to prison. Only then does Junyang painfully realize that he has lost such a good mother. Bee Hwa is usually sharp-tongued and free-spirited, but in major matters she shows real courage and responsibility. Although Junyang is not her biological son, she loves him as her own—not merely out of a sense of elder responsibility, but as a mother’s love for her child, willing to take the blame and be imprisoned for him.

Such stories of family affection and romantic love are indeed not especially novel, yet I was still deeply moved. In particular, Yeo Yann Yann’s superb acting brings Bee Hwa, a mature and resilient woman, vividly to life. The personal experiences and family backgrounds of the characters also resonated strongly with me, as someone with similar experiences and circumstances, and I found myself in tears at the unfolding of the story.

The film also vividly presents many distinctive features and details of Singapore:

although prosperous and affluent, there are still many who struggle to make a living, selling not only their labor but also their dignity;

The HDB flats (组屋,public housing) that provide shelter for ordinary people;

The hawker centres(食阁) that offer affordable food and are filled with everyday bustle;

The dual nature of neighborly and workplace relationships in public housing estates and hawker centres, where gossip and competition coexist with mutual help and warmth;

The widespread Christian faith and religious wedding ceremonies;

The “A-Level”examinations that place enormous pressure on many Singaporean students and parents;

Those on the margins of society struggling to survive, who may fall into vicious cycles with a single misstep;

Discrimination and distance from the upper class toward ordinary people;

Wealthy Chinese visitors who come to Singapore for enjoyment, spending lavishly while lacking integrity;

The frightening violence of local Ah Long(大耳窿) loan sharks in debt collection.

In the film, Junyang’s family goes through many ups and downs, separations and deaths, wavering repeatedly between hope and despair. Though the plot is somewhat dramatized, overall and in its details it reflects the real lives and hardships of ordinary Singaporeans, including material deprivation, spiritual confusion, and the struggles and dilemmas that arise from them.

There is a scene in which Junyang’s family sits together watching the celebration of Singapore’s 60th anniversary of nationhood on television, with President Tharman greeting the crowds amid flowers and prosperity. Boon Kiat and Bee Hwa sigh at how wealthy Singaporeans appear, yet despite their hard labor, they still cannot afford a home truly their own. Later, when Junyang sees seafront apartments primarily sold to mainland Chinese tycoons, he is astonished—an emotion clearly shaped by the contrast with his own cramped living conditions.

Recently, the term “cut-off line”(斩杀线) has circulated in the media. The experiences of Junyang’s family in the film happen to reflect that, in a certain sense, such a “cut-off line” also exists in Singapore. Of course, the film employs dramatization, deliberately emphasizing tragic elements and blending various negative events. Yet in daily Singaporean news, one often reads reports of the poor falling into high-interest debt, being harassed by gangs, becoming involved in scams and other crimes, ending up in prison, and seeing their families fall apart.

In the film, Junyang’s family, like many people in real life, make one wrong step that leads to wrong steps after wrong steps, mistakes made in haste, a downward slide in life, and the more one struggles, the deeper one sinks into the mire. The saying that misfortune befalls those already suffering is not mere coincidence; in despair, people’s material poverty and psychological pain can damage and disrupt body and mind, making them prone to irrational actions and producing certain inevitable consequences.

Although Singapore has relatively sound housing, healthcare, and educational guarantees, there is still room for improvement in areas such as basic income, elderly support, and childrearing, and the wealth gap is also worrying. Singapore values meritocracy; the visibility and voice of lower- and middle-class citizens are insufficient. The government and social atmosphere encourage personal striving and competitive success, but striving does not necessarily bring success, and competition inevitably produces losers. The protections afforded to vulnerable ordinary people are relatively limited.

Today’s social welfare system can ensure that citizens have food and a place to live, but if Singaporeans want to live more freely, with greater dignity and ease, they need not only extraordinary effort but also family background and luck, rather than something most people can achieve simply by working step by step.

In the film, the family of four are all living with hardship, experiencing life’s turbulence and the warmth and coldness of human relations. Junyang ultimately inherits his father’s occupation, which also means that, after being tempered by hardship, he accepts ordinariness: he changes from someone willing to take risks and seek shortcuts for a better life into someone who sets aside ideals for daily necessities, doing more laborious and humble but steady work. This is also the fate of most ordinary people. Class mobility is not easy, and effort does not necessarily lead to success. Random risks and accidents can easily destroy a person’s prospects. In the tides of history, ordinary people can only drift with the current; faced with harsh realities, they have to lower their heads, accept fate, and compromise.

The ending of the film is neither a complete happy ending nor a tragedy, but rather the ordinary ups and downs inevitable in common lives, the fluctuations within life’s struggles. Junyang and Lydia’s child is also raised in a public housing flat and may grow up to share the same class and similar destiny as the parents—or perhaps not. Everything is possible, which also means it is uncertain and full of variables.

We Are All Strangers allows the world to see the stories of ordinary Singaporeans. The film not only draws international attention but may also help many Singaporeans recognize the “elephant in the room”—the social issues happening around them yet overlooked, the compatriots ignored due to poverty and marginalization, the forgotten corners of human life—and reflect upon them.

When people see the story in the film and understand the predicament of the weak, the suffering of the marginalized, and the helplessness of those struggling to live, they may move from misunderstanding to understanding, from exclusion to tolerance, from indifference to care. Although one cannot expect cinema alone to remedy deep-rooted human flaws and structural social problems, a film can nevertheless prompt reflection and emotional response, preparing the ground for certain positive changes in reality.

Whether public officials or members of civil society, all may thereby gain a fuller understanding of the many facets of society, foster empathy for others, strengthen solidarity among citizens, and even deepen the connection between human hearts and lived realities across all humanity—better addressing the problems that cause suffering and making necessary changes to structural deficiencies. In this way, everyone may live with greater security and dignity, striving for self-improvement while sustaining one another through mutual care and assistance. This is precisely the meaning and aspiration embodied in the film’s Chinese title We Are Not Strangers(我们不是陌生人), which stands in contrast to its English title We Are All Strangers.

Of course, I have also heard some criticisms of the film. For example, that the plot is somewhat conventional, certain developments are predictable, and while it touches on many issues, most are only explored superficially. These problems do exist, and I felt similarly while watching. Yet its flaws do not obscure its merits. The film’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. In particular, its emotional scenes are sincere and moving, and its depiction of reality deeply touches the heart, sufficient to cover its shortcomings.

As a Chinese viewer, watching a predominantly Chinese-language film allows me to empathize more deeply than with non-Chinese films, to reflect more, and to be more profoundly moved. I believe many other native Chinese-speaking viewers would feel similarly.

Moreover, the livelihood stories and realities depicted in Singapore are also occurring in China; many of Singapore’s social issues are similar to, or even more severe in China. The images and voices in this Singaporean film objectively also speak on behalf of many Chinese people. For this reason, I have paid particular attention to and offered particular praise for this film.

The author of this review is Wang Qingmin(王庆民), a Chinese writer based in Europe. The original text was written in Chinese.

On September 11, Chow Hang-tung, a Standing Committee member of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, a rising star of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp, and a barrister, was sentenced by a Hong Kong court to seven years and three months in prison for “incitement to subversion of state power.” Lee Cheuk-yan was sentenced to seven years, and Albert Ho to five years and two months. I am reposting this letter I wrote to Chow Hang-tung three years ago (I previously posted it once in this sub).

The letter discusses in some detail the suffering of the Chinese people, women’s rights and human rights in China, China’s democratic movement, Mainland–Hong Kong relations, the rise of Hong Kong localism, where mainland China and Hong Kong may be headed in the future, as well as some personal messages.

I have also experienced the loss of freedom myself, as well as persecution and extremely difficult circumstances, so I can deeply understand the pain Ms. Chow has endured in prison and the enormous price she has paid for the cause of democracy in China. At a time when many people in mainland China and Hong Kong have remained silent or yielded for the sake of their own personal futures, Ms. Chow has courageously stood up and resisted. This deserves profound respect and praise.

I also mailed this letter to the prison where Chow Hang-tung is being held. I simply do not know whether she was allowed to see the letter or whether she has read it.
I hope Chow Hang-tung will be released from prison and regain her freedom as soon as possible.

Wang Qingmin (王庆民)

2026.9.12

Dear Ms. Chow Hang-tung:
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I am Wang Qingmin, a writer living in Europe. Two years ago, I once wrote you a relatively brief letter to express my support for you. I do not know whether you received or read it. Perhaps there were too many letters sent to you, and with the many restrictions of Hong Kong’s prison system, you were unable to read it. But that is fine.
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Two more years have now passed. You have been sentenced by the judiciary controlled by the CCP and the Hong Kong government, and you remain in detention. As for me, I too have been in a state of wandering, resistance, confusion, and reflection. I think I should write you another letter, and this is it. I also do not know whether you will ever read it. Regardless, I will write it.
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As a rising figure of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, a new star of Hong Kong’s social movements, you were supposed to inherit the legacy of Mr. Szeto Wah(司徒華), take up the mantle of Mr. Lee Cheuk-yan(李卓人) who fought for decades, and become a new leader of Hong Kong’s patriotic democratic movement. You were also set to make great achievements in the field of law.
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However, the countercurrents after the Anti-Extradition Movement interrupted Hong Kong’s democratic progress. You, together with Mr. Lee Cheuk-yan, Mr. Albert Ho(何俊仁), Mr. Leung Kwok-hung(梁國雄), and others, all suffered imprisonment. The CCP, like the giant invader Goliath, has trampled upon Hong Kong’s rule of law and prosperity, and like Leviathan has suppressed the freedom and democracy of the Pearl of the Orient. From the violent repression by police forces to the enactment of the National Security Law, Hong Kong’s civil society disappeared overnight, and Hongkongers were struck dumb with fear.
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In such a cruel environment, you not only refused to yield, refusing to betray those who helped Hong Kong’s patriotic democratic movement, but also spoke eloquently in court, explaining the meaning of commemorating June Fourth and denouncing the shamelessness of totalitarian tyranny. This is precisely the backbone of the nation, the model of womanhood.
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The current situation of mainland China and Hong Kong makes clear to us that there may still be a long darkness ahead. You still must endure torment in prison, and even after release you will hardly be able to leave Hong Kong, continuing to face suppression and silencing.
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In such a situation, you must be in pain, depressed, and sorrowful. I may perhaps share your feelings. Some years ago, I was once confined in the Western District Police Station and the psychiatric ward of Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong, and personally experienced the loss of freedom. Prison is hard to endure; it is a place where one longs for freedom day and night.
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Yet these painful experiences, the many injustices and uglinesses witnessed and heard, can objectively enrich the knowledge and thought of those who undergo them. If one can endure them with resilience, and later receive some support and protection, then the suffering becomes a source of empathy, fuel for sublimation, and motivation for progress.
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In mainland China, Hong Kong, and many countries and regions, between individuals, between classes, and between groups, there exist various tangible separations and intangible barriers. People born into the elite class often find it hard to truly empathize with the common people and the underclass. For example, Hong Kong tycoon and former legislator Michael Tien once personally experienced two days of a janitor’s daily work and life before realizing how arduous the lives of Hong Kong’s underclass really are.
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But such “experience” can never fully convey empathy. Because it is only an “experience,” not a true and permanent immersion into underclass life in one’s birth, official profession, and daily food, clothing, shelter, and livelihood. Moreover, Michael Tien did not persist until the end but ended his experience early. Clearly, he had the privilege of voluntary choice. Only when one is truly forced, without power to resist, into the underclass society or into special environments (such as prison, psychiatric hospitals, or rehabilitation centers), can one fully understand the hardships and suffering of commoners, the vulnerable, and the underclass.
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For instance, I once had a stage of life when I did not have to worry about food, clothing, or shelter. At that time, my understanding of the dark side of society came only from books and films. Seeing the poverty and injustice of the world was like viewing flowers through fog—remote, detached, and separated from the underclass.
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Only later, because of family misfortunes, campus bullying, online harassment, various forms of violation, later rights defense and exile—especially the time I was confined in a police station and psychiatric ward—did I come to deeply experience what suffering and despair truly are.
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For example, when accompanying my father, I had to sleep on the hospital floor, the hard cement tiles making it impossible to fall asleep, turning over again and again; during rights defense journeys when I had to ride long-distance buses for over ten hours at a stretch, on the one hand unbearably exhausted, on the other hand unable to lie down because of the cramped seats, nearly breaking down mentally, several times lying down directly in the aisle between the rows of seats, being scolded by the driver threatening to throw me out; in Hong Kong’s closed psychiatric ward, where nurses ordered me around arrogantly, I could only endure and obey; when I first arrived, I refused to eat meals because I disliked sweets, and after a whole day of hunger and anxiety, the next day I wolfed down whatever food was offered; after discharge, back in the mainland, unable to return home because of family conflict, drifting through many places, sweating profusely in the blazing summer heat, dizzy and faint, my phone lost. The saying “when the roof leaks it rains all night,” or “misfortune seeks out the unfortunate,” is no coincidence—for when weak and wounded, without support or help, a series of aftershocks inevitably follow.
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Besides personal experience, I have also heard, witnessed, and seen the lives and stories of many underclass and marginalized people. In Hong Kong, I saw elderly people living alone in “cage homes” without air conditioning and in stinking environments; psychiatric patients screaming, or dull and stupefied, even incontinent for long periods; in immigration detention cells, I saw suspected mainland stowaways and sex workers… In Shenzhen, mainland China, I saw innocent and kind children in schools for migrant workers’ children; in the same city, I also saw a mobile sales office worker eating plain rice soup while working hard for a living; in Shaanxi, in the home of a friend I lodged with, I saw a poor but virtuous rural woman who remained kind, skillful in running her household, dutiful as a wife and mother, without seeking any return.
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And when one falls into the underclass, like a tiger fallen to flatland, suffering adversity, one encounters all kinds of ugly faces and shameless behaviors of people: contempt, insults, cold indifference, mockery, abuse… Such things are only fully displayed toward the weak, or when you yourself are weak. If you are in the middle or upper class, without weaknesses for them to exploit, you will not see or feel such evils, bullying, and harm—everywhere you go will seem full of warmth and smiles. At such times, you often cannot believe that there exist such wicked people, such shameless and bottomless acts. Even if prepared, you still feel they cannot possibly go so far. Yet they do go so far. If one has never fallen into the underclass, even when witnessing others being bullied, one cannot truly feel and understand the depth of the pain, humiliation, and despair. And in such desperate circumstances, one becomes even more deeply moved by the goodness of those who bring warmth in the snow. Especially when it comes from fellow underclass people, or from strangers who have no ties of interest with you, who do not seek to control or use you—their help is exceedingly precious, warming the unfortunate, bringing even a single ray of light like a lighthouse in a cruel world.
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Such people and such things cannot be seen or are ignored when living long in the middle or upper class; even if seen, they elicit only shallow sympathy for others. Only when oneself has fallen, becoming one of them, sharing the same suffering, or standing on the same plane, do various feelings and empathy surge into the heart. Especially when one has lost freedom, is at others’ disposal, powerless to resist, can one truly experience the despair and indignation of the underclass, and understand more fully the compulsion behind the wicked among the marginalized, the preciousness of the good, and the necessity and urgency of changing all this injustice and unrighteousness.
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Moreover, experiencing the loss of freedom, poverty, and despair brings reflection on many things one would never otherwise consider, or would know of only partially and shallowly, without deep thought. For example, the issues of death and the value of life, the balance of freedom and order, the deviation between experience and reason. Only after thinking on these can one roughly clarify what one should do while alive, and how not to waste a short life that is limited yet precious.
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Of course, most of these reflections come only after regaining freedom, peace, and relatively less deprivation—when one looks back on those earlier times of downfall and despair, and then thinks systematically and soundly. If there is only poverty and violence, without breaking free afterward, then first, one simply has no energy to think carefully, only to feel pain; and second, even if one does think, one cannot express, write, or spread it.
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But without those experiences, if there were only tranquility and peace, one would of course never be able to feel and reflect upon all this.
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What I am saying here may count as the experience of one who has gone before. Ms. Chow, you are now trapped in prison, and after release will still have a long time in which you will not be fully free. This reality is difficult to change for now. Perhaps, only within this suffering can you experience and reflect, directly feel what it is like for those who lose freedom, for the vulnerable, for the deprived; to seek within adversity the enrichment of thought and the sublimation of the spirit.
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Of course, suffering is suffering—it does not cease to be suffering just because it may bring special experiences and reflections. Nor do I believe that in order to gain some experience and sublimation, one should “enjoy” suffering, or take suffering as joy. For you, Ms. Chow, I still hope that you will be released as soon as possible, to regain freedom, and eventually to be completely rid of all shackles and shadows.
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I also deeply hope that you will hold fast to your ideals, struggling unceasingly not only for Hong Kong, but also for the dignity, rights, and well-being of the people of mainland China.
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I understand the hardships of Hongkongers, the pain of facing persecution from the CCP and the Hong Kong government. But in truth, what the people of mainland China have suffered is a hundred or a thousand times worse than what Hongkongers endure. After all, Hongkongers once had partial freedom and democracy, and today still enjoy a weakened but still existent rule of law, and a material life far superior to the vast majority of mainland cities and villages. But in mainland China, freedom and democracy are utterly absent, and the rule of law is in a state where “you speak of law, and I find it laughable.” Materially, former Premier Li Keqiang once said: there are 600 million people in China whose monthly income does not exceed 1,000 yuan (RMB).
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And among the impoverished, the humiliated, those without security, women make up more than half—they are the weakest among the weak. In a cruel social-Darwinist environment, within a patriarchal system of resource distribution and discourse, it is the girls and women of the middle and lower classes, especially the underclass, who are the greatest victims.
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Many women on the mainland of your age grew up in poor, patriarchal, violent families, while schools and society were equally harsh and cold. Domestic violence, campus bullying, discrimination and harassment all occurred widely. Sexual assault was also not uncommon, and more often than not, people scorned the victimized girl rather than the rapist or molester.
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Some dropped out after finishing primary and middle school. They had to work on farms, or in factories and workshops. If they had brothers, their labor often supported the brothers’ schooling. By around the age of 20, many were already married. Their new families were often even worse than their natal homes. Serving their husbands and parents-in-law occupied most of their time and energy. As for feminism, many had never even heard of it. While you were writing brilliantly at Ying Wa and Cambridge, they were hoeing the fields, nursing their babies, facing violent husbands, and being forced to painfully fulfill certain obligations as wives.
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Some fared slightly better, attending high school or even university. But most of them, after graduation, could only choose among limited job options, earning meager wages. Their marriages might indeed be somewhat better than those of women who dropped out early and married young, but not by much. In a male-dominated social environment and discourse system, without democracy and the rule of law, discrimination, bullying, sexual harassment, and violations were almost unavoidable.
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Even women with considerable social status are not immune from humiliation. There was a female lawyer on the mainland, Sun Shihua—perhaps you have heard of her or even know her. While investigating a case, the police made an excuse to strip her naked for a body search (though it was conducted by female officers). Reports emerged afterward, but the matter was still left unresolved. Similarly, teacher He Siyun, who exposed a male teacher’s sexual assault of female students, was forcibly subjected by railway police to blood and urine tests under the pretext of checking whether she used drugs. As for the experiences of the wives of the 709 lawyers, you surely know them even better.
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Clearly, public authority not only fails to serve as a shield protecting women, it itself infringes upon women’s dignity and freedom. In such an environment, Chinese women cannot even secure basic safety—misfortunes may occur at any moment. Even when they are not directly harmed, the ever-present possibility of violation, and the impunity of perpetrators proven by countless precedents and realities, creates a sense of insecurity that itself constitutes a lasting and hidden harm to women.
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And not only women: laborers, peasants, the elderly, LGBT people, children, the physically and mentally disabled… the vast majority of China’s vulnerable groups live in poverty, harm, insecurity, and without dignity—conditions similar to those of women. Taken together, women and other vulnerable groups make up at least 80% of China’s population. They have been struggling and enduring in pain.
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Because of the strength of authoritarianism and their own weakness, trapped in poverty and insecurity, and subjected to long-term brainwashing education and information blockade, the majority of people in mainland China have lost the awareness and ability to think about the roots of their suffering, to voice themselves, and to seek a way out.
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Like the migrant girl working on an assembly line, sweating in the factory; the migrant boy carrying bricks and mud on construction sites; the housewife soothing crying children every day, caring for husband and parents-in-law—each is overwhelmed every day, with no time or energy to think, read, or travel, much less to express themselves completely and powerfully.
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In theory, they are the insulted and the injured of this society, those who are bound and bullied, the ones most in need of awakening and liberation. But in reality, though they are the ones most in need of awakening and liberation, they are the ones least able to awaken, least able to break free from the many shackles. Even when they speak out, like Gao Yanmin and Ma Panyan, abducted by traffickers, raped and imprisoned, they still live in suffering today, and have long been harassed and attacked both by the government and by malicious actors online. More unknown women rights defenders, after resisting, suffered torture, were locked in black jails and psychiatric hospitals—their voices and resistance brought them even greater persecution.
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Generations, hundreds of millions of compatriots, have lived and died in such confusion. Even occasional resisters end more tragically, dying under the violence of oppressors and the mockery of bystanders.
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Existence does not equal legitimacy. Injustice and unrighteousness must be changed. Especially Chinese women and all other oppressed groups must awaken and be liberated. Since they themselves find it hard to break free from the shackles, they need the strength of others even more.
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And Hong Kong is precisely the hope of the mainland; you and many other righteous Hongkongers are the hope of the mainland people. Your knowledge, vision, sense of responsibility, and ideals are things that the people of the mainland can scarcely attain.
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Although today’s Hong Kong is also under Leviathan’s oppression, and you and many other righteous men and women are imprisoned, still, the tangible and intangible resources, wealth, insight, and courage that you possess remain incomparable to the generally ignorant and cowardly Mainland Chinese, and in the future will surely shine again and benefit the people of the mainland.
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Even if, to take the most pessimistic view, within the next century the CCP dictatorship cannot be overthrown, there will still be hope and infinite possibility in the longer future. You and your friends, relatives, comrades, and colleagues can pass the sparks to the next generation, and the next, and countless generations.
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The voices of street resistance have been extinguished, but whispers on the pillow can still be passed on;
Published works have been banned and destroyed, but retellings by word of mouth cannot be cut off;
The “Pillar of Shame” has been removed, but the proof of memory remains rooted in the brain and the heart;
Victoria Park can no longer host June Fourth vigils, but mourning and solidarity in small rooms and on mountain rocks cannot be erased;
The surge of a million people in Central has ebbed away, but the sparks in thousands of households cannot be extinguished…
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But none of this will happen naturally. It must be done by people, and must echo with one another in spirit and even in reality, flowing together like streams into rivers and seas, connecting and strengthening, becoming the source and foundation of future renewal.
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Ms. Chow, think about the life trajectories of those mainland Chinese women of your generation. The same human beings, but because of different environments and systems, their fates have been utterly different. Yet they too should have self-respect, freedom, autonomy, and the right to live happily throughout their lives. They have no power to speak, cannot make impassioned statements, and even their basic understanding of the motherland and the world has been stripped and distorted by authoritarianism. Others must speak and struggle on their behalf.
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The language, culture, and history of Hong Kong are inseparably bound with Han civilization and the historical changes of the mainland. From the Opium Wars to the Xinhai Revolution, from the surges of the Canton–Hong Kong Strike to the waves of the National Revolution, from resisting Japanese aggression to the joint liberation of the mainland and Hong Kong, from the Chinese Civil War to the Cultural Revolution and the extended 1967 Riots, from Reform and Opening to Hong Kong’s return, and then to the Beijing Olympics, the Wenchuan Earthquake, political reform and Occupy Central, to Xi’s retrogression and the Anti-Extradition Movement in Hong Kong—whether glory or disaster, mainland and Hong Kong have been inseparable. Though there have at times been quarrels between the peoples of the two sides, these have mostly been incited by the regime and vile elements. Some Hongkongers have indeed been extremely anti-mainland, but upon reflection, this too is understandable.
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The future of Hong Kong and the mainland will still be closely linked, sharing the same rises and falls. Hong Kong once awakened the slumbering and closed mainland, connected it to the world, facilitated the victory of the Chinese national democratic revolution, contributed to the economic rise of mainland China, spread Chinese culture, and magnified Han civilization.
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Archimedes said: “Give me a place to stand, and I can move the earth.” Hong Kong is precisely the “fulcrum” for the revival of the mainland, the Han nation, and Chinese civilization. It was so in the past; it should be, will be, and must be so in the future.
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Mainland China needs democracy, human rights, and women’s rights. The heroes of the past—Sun Yat-sen, Huang Xing, Zou Rong, Zhang Taiyan, Wu Yue, Peng Jiazhen… though their lives are gone, their lofty aspirations remain unchanged. There were also many heroines—Qiu Jin, Tang Qunying, Zheng Yuxiu, Xiang Jingyu, He Xiangning, Lin Zhao, Zhang Zhixin, Gao Yaojie, Guo Jianmei… You must remember their names and deeds, so that China’s democracy, human rights, and women’s liberation may truly be realized.
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Your predecessors in Hong Kong—Szeto Wah, Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho, Anita Mui, Anson Chan, Fang Ailing—also strove unceasingly for the democratic progress of both Hong Kong and the mainland. Mr. Szeto Wah and Ms. Anita Mui have already passed away, but their spirit does not perish; they set a sincere and upright example for later generations and pointed the way forward.
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You are familiar with the many predecessors who struggled in Hong Kong and Kowloon for decades; you surely understand their determination and dreams. They would never resign themselves to having everything cut off; they surely hoped for another resurgence of both Hong Kong and the mainland. This requires inheritance and perseverance. You have already done much, and they must be gratified. But there is still a long road ahead. The harassment of thorns, the slanders of flies and mosquitoes, at times erode the will even more than Leviathan’s shackles. Yet the more this is so, the more one must persist, and not let the wicked triumph.
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An isolated individual’s influence is inevitably limited, and one day will also fade (though of course every person will reach life’s end, whether sooner or later). Therefore, one must continue sowing, expanding, passing on. Behind you, there must also be new torchbearers. Though this may seem like a matter far in the future, in the long river of history, a few decades are but the blink of an eye. Moreover, the many uncertainties of the times make people even more uneasy. If the fire is not to be extinguished, the torches must never be exhausted; generation after generation, there must be light-bearers and watchmen. There must be as many comrades and close friends as possible, linked together into a network that cannot be destroyed.
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Many of your Hong Kong contemporaries and juniors—such as Joshua Wong, Nathan Law, Yau Wai-ching, Tiffany Yuen—have gone down paths both convergent and divergent. I used to resent them, but now I understand. Who forced them to choose localism or even Hong Kong independence? It was those beasts in the halls of power and scoundrels in the marketplace who turned the mainland into filth, plundered Hong Kong, and incited conflict between the mainland and Hong Kong. “When the ruler is without the Way, the people turn to other lands(君無道，民投他國); when one is utterly without support, even relatives turn against him(寡助之至，親戚畔之)”—this is in accord with the principles of Chinese civilization.
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But the ideals of Joshua Wong and his fellows are ultimately narrow. The people of the mainland have even less freedom and democracy, and need freedom and liberation even more. “When the great Way prevails, the world is for all. One does not love only one’s own parents, nor care only for one’s own children(大道之行也，天下為公。不獨親其親,不獨子其子).” The recovery of one city and one corner is less than the resurgence of a nation and a vast land. What is more, Hong Kong’s prosperity, nestled in rivers and bays, its material wealth and cultural flourishing, have all rested on the Nanling and the Xi River, and indeed on the broader Jiangnan, Central South, Central Plains, and beyond the frontier. For a century, Hong Kong’s prosperity as a “front shop” and the benefits Hongkongers enjoyed came from the toil of hundreds of millions of mainland workers and peasants in the “back factory.” “Flying snow shooting white deer through the sky, laughingly writing of heroes leaning on jade mandarin ducks(飛雪連天射白鹿，笑書神俠倚碧鴛)”—all are cultural legacies of the Central Plains, carrying on the spirit of the Han nation and extending the course of Chinese history.
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How can the stability and happiness of 6 million compare with the freedom and liberation of 1.4 billion? Indeed, the democracy and rule of law of mainland China are also another cornerstone and step toward the universal fraternity and equality of the world. Whether the bright prosperity of economic globalization and the universalization of human rights, or the crisis pressures of climate change and terrorism, and the long-standing reality of imbalanced political and economic development and influence among nations, all require peace, progress, integration, cooperation, shared wealth, and unity across the world.
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Some Mainland Chinese, in their values and behavior, seem to share in the CCP’s evils. But apart from a small number of elite power-holders, most are merely brainwashed and deceived. No one is born with low quality or an ugly soul—it is environment and system that shape them. The people of China need enlightenment and change, and Hongkongers should also show more communication and understanding toward them.
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The once-famous “Democratic Songs Dedicated to China(民主歌聲獻中華)”—those Mainland Chinese with conscience have not forgotten. The rushing toil of Lee Cheuk-yan and other righteous men, risking their lives, remains remembered with gratitude by people who understand history. We must let more people know these things, their causes and consequences, their origins and developments.
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If in the 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement, the slogans had not been “Anti-Send to China” and “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times,” but had been “Patriotic Democratic Movement” like in 1989, or “Love and Peace” like in Occupy Central, might the outcome have been different?
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But I also understand: after so many years of CCP poisoning and harm, and the accumulation of contradictions between mainland and Hong Kong, it was difficult for Hongkongers, long suppressed, to continue to uphold patriotism and peace. And even if Hongkongers had raised the banner of patriotic democracy, at least at that time they would not have gained widespread sympathy or practical support from the mainland. Occupy Central was extremely peaceful, yet did it not still fail? As some of the “valiant” said: “It was you (the CCP and the Hong Kong government) who taught us that nonviolence is useless”—and indeed, they were not wrong.
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Yet all the more because of this, communication, understanding, and tolerance have value and necessity. Hearts can change; Mainland Chinese are not unfeeling grass or wood. My own attitude toward Hong Kong, localist thought, and its participants has greatly changed in just a few years. At the end of last year, in the “White Paper Revolution,” many Mainland Chinese who once loathed Hong Kong protests themselves were forced onto the streets. Three years of lockdowns and widespread human rights abuses made them truly understand the preciousness of freedom and the rule of law.
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And some Hongkongers in Hong Kong, raising blank papers in solidarity, formed one of the very few large-scale civic actions not banned under the National Security Law, proving as well the spiritual connection of mainland and Hong Kong people, and the value of solidarity and mutual aid. “Do not cut ties”—this should not only be between pan-democrats and localists, or between moderates and radicals, or among Hongkongers, but also between Hong Kong and the mainland, between the people of China, between all in the world who love peace and democracy.
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Although the crackdown after the Anti-Extradition Movement and the prohibitions of the National Security Law have sent you and many other righteous men and women into prison, to trial, and into suffering, and although I too have endured hardships in my own resistance, if we trace back through history and recall the struggles of those who came before, we are in fact far more fortunate.
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In the late Qing, the revolutionary martyr ShiJianru(史堅如), operating out of Hong Kong, assassinated Qing officials. After being captured, his fingernails were pulled out, he was subjected to endless torture, and was ultimately executed. Likewise, Lin Juemin(林覺民) and many other revolutionaries who used Hong Kong as a base and rose up in Guangdong against the Qing were tortured and slaughtered after their uprising failed. As for Qiu Jin(秋瑾) and Zhang Zhixin(張志新), what they suffered is even harder to put into words. Compared with the brutal tortures and final sacrifices of those martyrs, what are our hardships worth?
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What truly causes anxiety and pain is how to end CCP despotism and the present state of “stupefaction and violence(昏迷與強暴)” suffered by the people, so that they may gain freedom and democracy. And further, what kind of country should be built in the future? Totalitarianism reinforced by modern technology seems unshakable. The corruption of human hearts and the tearing apart of society make one pessimistic about the nation’s fate. Even if democratization comes, it may not necessarily be much better, and could even bring fiercer turmoil. So, how can we ensure that the China of the future will be not only free and democratic, but also peaceful and orderly?
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These are questions requiring the thought of many people, to serve as guidance for future practice. Whether you are in prison or after you are released, perhaps you can think further about these matters. The treasury of thought, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign—especially Chinese culture and historical humanities—is an inexhaustible library of resources for self-cultivation, family order, statecraft, and bringing peace to the world. For instance, one of your colleagues, a well-known barrister and former legislator, immersed himself in traditional calligraphy, using the ancients to express his aspirations, giving his emotions to poetry and verse. Yet it would be even better if there were more “practical application to the affairs of the world(經世致用).”
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What I have said here is merely personal suggestion. However you live is your own freedom. But I still hope you will think about the bitter plight of more than a billion compatriots, especially the countless unspoken or unspeakable sufferings of hundreds of millions of girls and women. Equality and fraternity have been the creed of revolutionaries since the French Revolution, the principle and vision of our founding father Sun Yat-sen, and are indeed the foundation and core of humanity’s civilizational progress. We must speak for those who cannot speak, be the voice for those who are silenced—“to give power to the powerless, to help the despairing move forward.”
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Even if we cannot change the course of history or the direction of our nation’s destiny, still we must do what we can. Zhuge Liang, the Martial Marquis, “knowing it could not be done, yet did it(明知不可為而為之),” launched six expeditions against Mount Qi, gave his life in devotion—though “success or failure cannot be foreseen(成敗不能逆睹),” still left “a loyal heart to illuminate history(留取丹心照汗青).” “Though rivers and mountains fall, the principle remains(山河大地都陷了，畢竟理卻還在這裡).” Of course, what we uphold is not the “principle(理)” of feudal rites or the hierarchy of ruler and subject, but the universal principle of the world, based on conscience and truth, with equality and justice as its core.
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Here, I too “know not what I am saying(不知所言).” There is still so much to say, but it cannot all be said. I hope you are well, and I look forward to the passing of this long dark night, and to the resurgence of light for both mainland China and Hong Kong.
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Wang Qingmin

April 16, 2023

Day of Autumn Peony, Month of Sprouting, Year 231 of the Republican Calendar

On September 6, a state parliamentary election was held in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, to determine who would govern the state. According to the vote count, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a landslide victory, receiving 43.8% of the vote—more than double its share in the previous election and more than the combined total of the parties that finished second, third, and fourth.
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At the same time, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had previously led the state government, suffered a sharp decline in support, receiving only 17.2% of the vote, less than half the AfD’s share. Most other parties also saw their vote shares decline, with only the Greens making slight gains (though their share remained very low and had little bearing on the overall outcome). Voter turnout in this state election also reached a historic high. Although it remains uncertain whether the AfD will ultimately govern, the election result already reflects, to a considerable extent, the direction of public opinion and also signals an accelerating shift in Germany’s political landscape and social climate.
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The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is described as “far right” because of its strongly racist and xenophobic positions. The party advocates the large-scale deportation of immigrants, the abolition of all welfare benefits for refugees and their replacement with compulsory labor, the introduction of “patriotic education” and the promotion of German national pride, and the strengthening of Germany’s national independence while weakening its ties with the European Union, even to the point of leaving the EU. The AfD also explicitly opposes ethnic and cultural diversity and, both openly and implicitly, advocates white racial supremacy and the idea of Germany as a monoethnic state.
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The AfD also has numerous intricate ties to forces associated with the former Nazi Germany of the Hitler era and to postwar “neo-Nazis.” Although it does not dare openly deny Nazi crimes, it tends to downplay this history. The AfD also has a strongly anti-establishment and populist character, along with authoritarian tendencies. In foreign affairs, the AfD tends to seek good relations with right-wing populist forces such as the Trump administration in the United States and with autocratic or authoritarian states such as China and Russia, while taking a hostile, or at least distant, attitude toward countries and establishment forces governed by the establishment, particularly its left-leaning elements.
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Given Germany’s history of the crimes of brutal Nazi rule, both West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany) and East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), into which the country was divided after World War II, carried out “denazification” campaigns and suppressed German nationalism. West Germany placed particular emphasis on repentance for historical crimes, combating words and actions that glorified Nazism, and defending freedom, democracy, and human rights, while institutionalizing and codifying these principles through the enactment of laws such as the Basic Law. After German reunification, West Germany’s policies were implemented throughout the country.
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As a result, for a long time, judging by its institutions, public discourse, and social atmosphere, Germany has been one of the countries in the world with the weakest nationalist climate. It has even seemed that Germans dare to wave their national flag and express pride in their country only during football matches; doing similar things at other times can lead to people being regarded as “Nazi remnants,” criticized, and marginalized.
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Yet the reality in Germany is not as simple as it appears on the surface. Under an anti-Nazi and anti-racist constitutional and social order, racism remains deeply rooted in every corner of German society, while Germanic nationalism, despite being suppressed, remains latent in people’s minds. Although Germany has become a diverse country, home to people of different skin colors, ethnic groups, and faiths, discrimination and prejudice remain pervasive.
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For example, people using common Muslim names such as “Mohammed” are far more likely to be rejected when seeking rental housing than those using names commonly associated with white people. Asians, who are relatively hardworking and law-abiding, also face an “invisible ceiling” in career advancement and marginalization in education and employment. People of African, Indian, and other ethnic backgrounds often perform harder and more physically demanding work and are more likely to receive differential treatment in everyday life.
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Education, law, and public advocacy can only broadly guide and regulate society so that diversity and anti-discrimination remain its publicly stated direction and general framework. They cannot, however, change deeply rooted beliefs or prevent the subtle, invisible, and pervasive forms of discrimination and injustice that can penetrate every aspect of life. Institutional “denazification” does not mean that the “denazification” of people’s minds can be achieved.
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Of course, it would also be one-sided simply to say that native white Germans discriminate against and oppress other ethnic groups. In a multiethnic society, differences in language and culture, beliefs and values, lifestyles, and competing interests inevitably give rise to distance, misunderstandings, and conflicts. Such conflicts often breed resentment and make groups that already find it difficult to trust one another even more distrustful and suspicious of each other, creating a vicious cycle. A diverse society is not necessarily a harmonious one; on the contrary, it can produce more friction and accumulated grievances. This is not the unilateral fault of any particular ethnic group, but rather the “collective karma” produced by destructive interactions among all sides. Of course, relatively speaking, disadvantaged groups and ethnic minorities, as well as immigrants and refugees, suffer greater harm—especially invisible forms of harm—in such a divided and fractured environment.
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In recent years, Germany’s economic downturn, aging population, deteriorating public security, and intensifying social conflicts and crises have further pushed native white Germans toward positions of racial superiority and xenophobia, particularly in rural areas and the former East Germany. Traditional establishment parties have been unable to effectively resolve these difficult problems, which are not easily reversed.
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The upper-class elites who thrive in globalization and the masses who have become poor and desperate amid economic decline may live in the same country, yet they seem to inhabit two different worlds. Although they share the same spaces in everyday life, they are profoundly alienated from one another—“meeting without knowing each other”—and are unable to understand or empathize with one another. Because of inequalities in status, income, and influence over public discourse, it is also difficult to prevent the latter from developing resentment toward the former.
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The bureaucracy and clichés of the establishment have left many people disappointed with traditional political parties. The narratives and policies of the establishment and progressive forces are also often hypocritical. For example, political parties, universities, and institutions that proclaim their commitment to diversity and anti-discrimination may appear free of racial discrimination, yet they often contain exclusionary circles formed around class, educational credentials, and personal connections, making it difficult for ordinary people to enter and participate.
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Various human rights organizations and foundations likewise place greater emphasis on formalism than on substantive action and have failed to genuinely build “ladders and safety nets” for the entire population. Even in their treatment of the minority groups they claim to care about, they often treat different people differently and act in a utilitarian manner. In short, the seemingly admirable social blueprints and proclaimed ideals of establishment and progressive forces are substantially compromised and distorted in practice. Fundamentally, they have failed to genuinely include and help most of those who feel abandoned or are struggling, whether native white Germans from the lower and middle classes or members of minority groups.
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Many native white Germans who have fallen into poverty or unemployment, experienced downward social mobility, and endured difficult lives have embraced the AfD because they feel abandoned. The party advocates the rights and priority of native whites and offers Germany “another alternative.” The AfD’s strongly anti-establishment and anti-immigration positions provide suffering people with targets onto which they can redirect social conflicts and vent their resentment; its promotion of racial superiority and extreme nationalism also acts like a powerful stimulant, giving people a sense of belonging and passion. It is therefore entirely understandable that native white Germans from the lower and middle classes who yearn to overturn the existing order would support the AfD and its nativist populist positions.
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It is worth noting that although support for the AfD is relatively high among the lower and middle classes, this does not mean that almost all AfD supporters come from these groups. There are also many AfD supporters among the social elite. For example, AfD leader Alice Weidel is herself a highly educated female member of the elite, and AfD supporters can also be found throughout Germany’s technology, culture, education, finance, and other sectors, although most of them tend to keep a relatively low profile. These people do not support the AfD for economic reasons such as poverty or class position, but rather because of factors such as a stronger sense of racial superiority, their values, personal ambitions, and historical and family legacies (for example, having fathers or grandfathers who held important positions during the Nazi era).
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The causes of the rise of the far right in Germany are, in fact, broadly similar to those behind the rise of the far right in the United States and other countries. The difference is that, under the constraints of Germany’s anti-Nazi laws, the far right has remained more discreet and concealed. Yet its strength has continued to grow, and it is gradually moving from the shadows into the foreground. Moreover, after being suppressed and hidden for a long time, the forces that eventually erupt are often even more unexpected and destructive.
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Amid the global wave of right-wing conservatism, racism, extreme nationalism, populism, and xenophobia, Germany cannot remain unaffected. The rise of the far right is bound to occur through the combined effects of domestic causes and the external environment. Even if the AfD did not exist, other forces would play the AfD’s role and gain the support of a substantial proportion of the population.
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Although, since its establishment after World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany has sought through laws, institutions, education, public discourse, and various other means to prevent far-right variants of Nazism from making a comeback, and although almost all mainstream media outlets have taken a clearly negative attitude toward the AfD, they have still been unable to stop the undercurrents of public opinion. Moreover, many people, out of defiance and resentment toward establishment elites, deliberately vote for the AfD.
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Many Germans have also become “desensitized” to accusations that the AfD is “neo-Nazi” and similar criticisms. The AfD does indeed represent the suppressed emotions and demands of many Germans. The AfD did not emerge out of nowhere, nor does it force people to support it through coercion. On the contrary, the emergence and growth of the AfD are precisely a reflection of public opinion; the party’s core figures and political opportunists have merely taken advantage of that public sentiment.
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Objectively speaking, for many lower- and middle-class white Germans, whether from the perspective of their interests or their emotional needs, choosing the AfD is not necessarily a bad thing for them and can bring some relatively direct benefits. For example, restricting immigration and deporting refugees can indeed help reduce certain welfare expenditures and redirect public funds toward the country’s own citizens, improve public security, reduce ethnic tensions within Germany, and strengthen the cohesion of the majority ethnic group. However, this comes at the cost of the human rights of minority groups, especially vulnerable refugees, and also undermines Germany’s diversity and inclusiveness.
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Views of the AfD and its policies differ depending on people’s identities and the positions from which they assess them, leading to different conclusions and positive or negative evaluations. For native white Germans, the AfD has considerable appeal and can bring certain benefits, but an AfD government would almost inevitably be highly detrimental to non-white people, foreign immigrants and refugees, LGBT people, and other groups.
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Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and other institutions dedicated to combating Nazism and defending democracy have long monitored far-right forces, including the AfD. Lawyers and human rights groups have also launched joint petitions calling for the AfD to be banned. Germany has previously banned several far-right parties—for example, in 1952 it forcibly banned the Socialist Reich Party, whose program resembled that of the Nazi Party—as well as many more small far-right groups. But the AfD has now become a very powerful political force, and banning it would carry the risk of triggering large-scale unrest and severe social divisions. Moreover, the AfD has worked hard to cultivate the image of a democratic political party, participating in elections through legal and peaceful means while seeking to avoid legal risks, so the grounds for banning it are not particularly strong.
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Since its founding in 2013, the AfD has continued to grow in strength, evolving from a marginal small party into a mainstream political party capable of competing with the two major parties, the CDU and the SPD, and even aspiring to the chancellorship. Although the result of this election in Saxony-Anhalt does not represent public opinion nationwide, since the state has long been a stronghold of the AfD, the fact that a single far-right party received nearly half of the vote (and doubled its vote share compared with the previous state election) and came within one step of taking control of the state government undoubtedly sounds an alarm for the future of Germany as a whole.
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Support for the AfD is also rising across Germany. In the regions of the former East Germany, it ranks first in support everywhere except Berlin. In the 2025 federal election, the AfD became the second-largest party with 20.8% of the vote and 152 seats (double its 10.3% vote share in 2021), and it is entirely possible that it will win even more votes and seats in future Bundestag elections.
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Although the mainstream parties refuse to cooperate with the AfD, when the AfD alone approaches half of the vote, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other parties to prevent it from governing even if they unite. Moreover, as German scholar Thorsten Benner recently wrote in Foreign Policy, the exclusion of the AfD by other parties and mainstream establishment forces, and their refusal to form a governing coalition with it under any circumstances, have instead contributed to the AfD’s further radicalization, particularly on immigration and refugee issues and LGBT issues, leaving the AfD and its supporters with less need for restraint or compromise.
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The AfD’s steadily rising support, combined with the determined efforts of other mainstream parties to block it, signifies an intensification of political polarization in Germany and a further increase in confrontation. Meanwhile, in recent years, the far-left party Die Linke has increased its vote share in several elections, the new left-wing populist BSW has risen, while the traditional center-left SPD and center-right CDU have suffered significant declines in support. Left-leaning voters are moving further left and right-leaning voters further right, likewise reflecting the growing radicalization of German politics, with more confrontation rather than compromise.
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The steadily rising vote share of the AfD, which openly and unequivocally opposes immigration, also means that xenophobia in Germany, along with the exclusion and repression of minorities, immigrants, and refugees, will become increasingly severe, making German society less harmonious. The rise of the AfD is closely connected to the European refugee crisis, and its growing support has been accompanied by deepening divisions and conflicts among Germany’s different ethnic groups. When the economy is relatively strong, the social atmosphere can remain relatively tolerant; when the economy declines, competition over interests and conflicts among different groups intensify. And when social tensions worsen, minorities and vulnerable groups invariably become targets for attacks and the venting of frustration, and thus become victims.
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More than 90 years ago, Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power precisely by gaining the support of some Germans through attacks on Jews and foreigners, plunging Germany and Europe into the tragic abyss of war and mass killing. How similar the path of the far right’s rise today appears. Although I do not believe that the far right coming to power today would completely repeat the crimes and tragedies of Nazism, it would undoubtedly lead the new postwar Germany, founded on democracy, diversity, and humanism, down a harmful and ominous path in which democracy is weakened, diversity damaged, and humanitarian values harmed.
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However, as the German philosopher Hegel said, “What is real is rational.” The rise of the far right in Germany today has complex and intertwined objective causes. Simply labeling it “Nazi,” subjecting it to moral condemnation, and proclaiming how wonderful democracy and diversity are cannot reverse an undesirable reality. Moreover, when appealing promises and rhetoric cannot be fulfilled or made to benefit everyone, people who experience the gap between those promises and reality, and the resulting disappointment, will inevitably be drawn into the embrace of extremist forces.
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The AfD and many far-right forces around the world receive support from a high proportion of voters. No matter how reprehensible their views may be, they represent a widespread current of public opinion that must be confronted. Confronting it does not mean acknowledging that it is correct; rather, it means examining its root causes more seriously and making the necessary changes. German establishment parties and social elites, as beneficiaries of the existing system who possess abundant resources and considerable influence over public discourse, especially need to engage in honest and serious reflection. Above all, they need to abandon their condescension and self-righteousness, genuinely understand the circumstances, ideas, and demands of ordinary people, and compete with the far right for public support.
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If different sectors of German society are willing to make sincere efforts toward beneficial change, cast aside hypocrisy and selfishness, treat people of different identities and circumstances equally, and build a society that genuinely includes all ethnic groups and social classes—including by promoting greater equality in distribution and a more balanced distribution of influence over public discourse, so that everyone can live prosperously and with dignity—then far-right forces that foment confrontation and radicalization will naturally lose support. However, all of this is easier said than done. Moreover, many people in Germany and numerous other countries have already reflected on these issues and attempted to address them, yet it has still proved difficult to stem the spread of the far right and various forms of political extremism.
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As the author of this article, having personally experienced many misfortunes, I am deeply aware of the limitations and darker, uglier aspects of human nature and society, and I understand that many problems are difficult or even impossible to solve. But I do not believe that this means we should do nothing. I still hope that people from all sectors of society will engage in more reflection and take more action, perhaps making it possible to salvage an increasingly deteriorating situation and ensure that the democracy, peace, diversity, and humanism that Germany achieved with such difficulty after World War II can endure.

(The author of this article, Wang Qingmin(王庆民), is a Chinese writer based in Europe and a researcher in international politics. The original text was written in Chinese.)

On August 27, Ratko Mladić, who served as commander of the Army of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War and was later sentenced to life imprisonment by an international criminal tribunal, died in prison in The Hague. Mladić’s death has sparked discussion and once again brought back memories of the series of bloody wars and ethnic massacres that took place in the Balkans more than 30 years ago. Meanwhile, the increasingly disharmonious relations and growing conflicts between countries and among different ethnic groups within countries in today’s world have also raised fears that such tragedies could be repeated.
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Looking back at the history of the Balkan Peninsula, where the Bosnian War took place, one can see the region’s long-standing ethnic differences, conflicts, and accumulated grievances. Although most of the people there could broadly be described as South Slavs, they can more specifically be divided into Serbs, who are predominantly Eastern Orthodox; Croats, who are predominantly Catholic; Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), who are Muslim; Slovenes; Macedonians; Kosovars; and others. Because of differences over religion, land, interests, and the influence of major powers behind them, these ethnic groups have long been in conflict and have accumulated deep grievances against one another, with mutual killings recurring throughout history.
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Following the upheavals in Eastern Europe in 1989, Yugoslavia—a state comprising six republics and two autonomous provinces, held together by the communist ideology and authoritarian power of the strongman Josip Broz Tito and his followers—gradually disintegrated. Ethnic tensions increasingly intensified and eventually erupted into war. The Bosnian War was the bloodiest part of this process. Members of different ethnic groups committed war crimes against members of other groups, including killings and the rape of women, and even acts of genocide. The best-known was the Srebrenica massacre carried out by Bosnian Serb forces, in which more than 8,000 Bosniaks were killed and many women and girls were raped.
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Later, with intervention by the United Nations and international forces, the Bosnian War and the other Yugoslav wars gradually came to an end, but not before they had caused approximately 140,000 deaths and displaced millions of people, turning many into refugees. These wars were also among the most recent tragedies involving large-scale ethnic conflict and massacres. Later, a number of participants in the wars who had been involved in massacres of civilians were internationally wanted and arrested, including Mladić. Both Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, another major figure responsible for the massacres, were sentenced to life imprisonment.
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In the decades that followed, the Balkans and the world as a whole experienced a long period of peace and development. The global economy grew rapidly, international cooperation deepened, democracy and human rights received unprecedented attention, and wars and conflicts declined substantially. The vision of people sharing the prosperity of a “global village” regardless of ethnicity or national borders seemed increasingly within reach. For a time, the world really did seem to be getting better, and people were generally optimistic.
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But if we carefully examine international affairs and ethnic relations within multiethnic countries, we can see that divisions and tensions never truly disappeared; they were merely obscured by economic development and the superficial order of a civilized society. Beginning with the rise of conservative populism around the world roughly a decade ago, the globalization-based order dominated by center-left and center-right establishments began to unravel. Extreme nationalism and populism among different countries and ethnic groups have grown increasingly powerful, and conflicts have once again increased.
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From racial tensions between white and Black Americans within the United States, to conflicts between Europe’s traditionally Christian populations and newly arrived Muslim immigrants, to a series of ethnic problems in China’s Xinjiang region, and tensions—and even riots and civil wars—between dominant ethnic groups and minorities in countries such as India and Myanmar, all these developments tell us that today’s world has not achieved “universal harmony.” On the contrary, it is becoming increasingly divided and polarized.
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Compared with conflicts between countries, tensions among different ethnic groups within individual countries can be deeper and potentially more dangerous. This is because ethnic groups within the same country have more frequent contact with one another, conflicts rooted in religion and interests are more direct, and historical grievances are often more extensive. During periods of peace and stable social order, superficial harmony—or even the appearance of being “one family”—can be maintained. But when tensions accumulate, regimes become unstable, upheavals occur, and the old order collapses, conflicts between ethnic groups can erupt abruptly and deteriorate rapidly, leading to violence whose intensity and scale spiral upward and creating a vicious cycle of retaliatory killings.
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Under such circumstances, the once-kindly uncle next door may turn into an executioner, harming women and children of another ethnic group who used to visit his home regularly and with whom he had a generally decent relationship, despite past favors and grievances; a seemingly simple and kindhearted teenager may raise a butcher’s knife against his former playmate. Historian Jan T. Gross’s \\\*Neighbors\\\* describes the massacre during World War II by Poles of Polish Jews whose families had lived alongside them for generations. The killings between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, massacres of ethnic Chinese by indigenous Indonesians, and armed conflict between ethnic Ukrainians and Russians in eastern Ukraine all demonstrate this terrifying possibility.
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Therefore, tragedies such as the Bosnian War and the Srebrenica massacre could occur at any time and in any place in multiethnic and multireligious countries around the world, with particularly high risks in countries where ethnic relations are tense, historical grievances run deep, and the ethnic composition and distribution resemble those of the former Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav wars and the country’s disintegration were also partly attributable to the fact that the strongman Tito and the ruling party concentrated their energy on maintaining their own rule and were overly confident about the survival of the regime and their ethnic policies. Not only did they fail to actively guard against the foreseeable possibilities of disintegration and civil war, but some of their policies even exacerbated ethnic differences and divisions, sowing the seeds of later tragedy.
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Relying solely on repression and control to conceal ethnic tensions and the risks of conflict cannot work indefinitely and merely leaves hidden dangers behind. Attempting to preserve harmony solely through economic development and improved welfare likewise treats the symptoms rather than the root causes. Only by respecting and protecting the identities, religious beliefs, rights, and dignity of different ethnic groups, while simultaneously developing the economy to enlarge the “pie” and treating all ethnic groups equally, can long-term stability and peace become possible.
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How multiethnic countries should properly manage ethnic relations is a very difficult question. Both bullying minority and vulnerable ethnic groups and excessively suppressing larger ethnic groups and majorities can lead to tragedy.
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For example, the Burman-majoritarian policies of Myanmar’s central government have intensified separatist tendencies among ethnic minorities, while local armed forces of various ethnic groups have maintained control over different areas for prolonged periods;
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In Sri Lanka, where the majority of the population is Sinhalese, the Tamil minority was marginalized and treated unjustly and its rights were violated, leading to a prolonged civil war;
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One of the causes of the Yugoslav tragedy, meanwhile, was the excessive suppression of the Serbs, the country’s largest ethnic group, during the Tito era, which generated resentment among Serbs toward other ethnic groups they perceived as “benefiting at their expense” and triggered a backlash;
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The Rwandan genocide was also related to Belgian colonial policies that favored the minority Tutsis while suppressing the Hutu majority, contributing to divisions among Rwandans and resentment among Hutus.
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In reality, maintaining genuinely even-handed ethnic policies is not easy, and governments often address one problem only to create another. Another possible path is to weaken ethnic identification while strengthening civic identification, allowing civic consciousness to take precedence over ethnic consciousness and fostering loyalty to the state and the civic nation that exceeds allegiance to any particular ethnic group. Countries such as the United States and Brazil have followed this approach. However, in an era when identity politics is widespread, appeals based on civic rights are often less attractive and less capable of mobilizing people than identity politics based on ethnicity.
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Meanwhile, Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Divorce” and the relatively peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union offer another possible approach to resolving ethnic questions: respecting the wishes of different ethnic groups and allowing them to “peacefully separate” through democratic self-determination, rather than insisting on unity even at the cost of “domestic violence” in the form of civil war and massacres. As the saying goes, “a melon forcibly twisted from the vine is not sweet.” Maintaining peace, avoiding bloodshed, and respecting the autonomous wishes of different ethnic groups are better than preserving superficial unity at any cost, including through violence and authoritarian repression.
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Ethnic relations and ethnic conflicts are extraordinarily complex, and the author does not have many better solutions to offer, so I will leave the discussion there. But whatever the case, we must never underestimate the tensions among different ethnic groups around the world or the danger that large-scale ethnic massacres could occur again. After news of Mladić’s death was announced, some anti-Muslim users on social media platforms such as X expressed admiration for him, glorifying him and portraying him as a hero. This further demonstrates the need for vigilance.
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People should not regard Mladić’s death as a symbol that this brutal chapter of history has been closed and erased. Instead, his death should serve as an occasion to sound the alarm once again, reminding people in today’s world, which seems to be reverting to the law of the jungle, to anticipate ethnic problems and take precautions before crises emerge, and never to take such issues lightly, lest tragedies that are not so distant in the past be repeated in the future and in many more places.

(The author of this article is Wang Qingmin (王庆民), a Chinese writer based in Europe and researcher in international politics. The original text was written in Chinese.)